Cisco? I don't think the NSA has any issues with Nokia, Ericsson or Samsung. It's just the ones based in China that seem suspicious.

There's money for Qualcomm in there somewhere, isn't there?

Huawei is banned from an infrastructure point of view. Qualcomm does device chips for phones and whatnot, not network infrastructure.

The US government hasn't banned consumer devices of Huawei (except for government purchases). So you can still buy a Huawei phone or laptop.

Also, Qualcomm basically had a monopoly in the US due to patents applying to CDMA phone tech (it's why most phones had different SKUs in the US versus the rest of the world, as you effectively needed a Qualcomm chip to get on Verizon's or Sprint's networks.)

I assumed they had some patents this time around too and if you had to license it for the handset you had to license it for the other side also. But I guess not.