Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway, it would be Finland and Sweden who do.
Supply chain trust has always been a primary concern of any kind of critical resource/infrastructure defensive strategy. Every time a country relies on another for a critical ongoing need, it introduces an inherent power imbalance that the supplying country can use as a leverage. This kind of stuff is centuries-old geopolitical strategy, and it's still in the news every day when we're talking about energy, food, minerals, etc. (e.g. Russian pipelines) Why is communications infrastructure any different? It's not.
Why are you limiting US strategic interests to protectionism of private companies? It is in the American Interest (both private and public spheres) if "Made in China 2025" were to fail: Huawei is a just one front in that war. In this light, minimizing Huawei's market access with (even in the absence of domestic competitors) makes strategic sense: less experience in the market, less revenue, less R&D). Technological expertise tends to bleed into military applications
"They have assembled a small army of suppliers to build a virtualized network built on x86 hardware. ... Rakuten has no dedicated hardware except in its antennas, ensuring the upgrade to 5G will be straightforward. ... Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin said the network has "virtualized everything," including radio access, core, transport, IP, billing and operational support systems."
I'm not sure who this army of suppliers is though.
The hardware is the easier part to account for, it’s both physical and a constant.
Europe needs to gain in tech and this is one easy way to do it, by supporting their own players, their own ecosystem. And it's a self-interest freebie at that: the US and EU interests are mostly aligned, there will be no push-back for supporting Ericsson & Co. The US would rather everyone use Ericcson than Huawei.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-e...
So, is it worth it to sacrifice VW and BMW in order to help Nokia and Ericsson?
Sure, but are you saying the tradeoff is worth it? It's fairly simple: if Europe begins taking protectionist measures that harm Chinese companies, then China will respond in kind.
Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.
We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.
>Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.
Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.
Vendor lock-in is not the issue. If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware (which is obviously insanely optimistic), that’s a problem. Wars have been won and lost with much less than 6 months of technological/infrastructural head start.
Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.
Also, it would afford them the additional political benefit of deniability in their attack.
There technically isn't, but 3GPP standardized interfaces leave enough room for there to be a smoother deployment and operational efficiencies gained from a single vendor deploying RAN and Core together. Few suppliers can do this -- Huawei is one of them.
>>Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.
Maybe this is region specific, but I believe most (all?) initial Huawei deployments are performed by Chinese nationals working directly for Huawei. To your point, maintenance (i.e. post-deployment, live production) can be a mix of foreign company employees and Chinese nationals.
On a long enough timeline, authoritarianism always wins.
You can buy components from different vendors, except that the overhead of working with thousands of different suppliers for your network is a non-starter, hence network operators around the world have moved to a model where they prefer large domain players to provide packages (e.g. 5G Access, 5G Core, 4G RAN, 4G EPC, etc.) to streamline purchasing, coordination, responsiveness and costs.
>>Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others.
Such extra components can be bought from others, except it should be noted that Huawei seems to provide very attractive prices for their "good enough" offerings in these other categories.
One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.
To cut it short. No, those databases are not stored in base stations, not even close. They are part of core network.
In LTE your handset talks to base transceiver station who talks to eNB who talks to MME who talks to HSS where the data is physically located. MME (Mobility Management Entity) is already part of the evolved Core Huawei has no access to that. Even MME keeps data just temporarily. This all happens in control plane.
If Huawei supplies transceiver stations or eNB's it's nowhere near the point where it could store and distribute user information or track them and not be noticed immediately.
I don't know why y'all are lacking imagination all of a sudden on this one matter, but I hope you come around.
But governments intrinsically see surveillance as an unquestioned good and likely wouldn't even approve such protocols for overt telecom use, never mind helping to develop them. The public has already been pwnt by design - this whole topic is just squabbling over who gets the proceeds.
Phone billing records seem a lot jucier for that.
US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for technical reasons. Telecom infrastructure is strategic industry and US want's to prevent Chinese getting ahead. US can't compete directly because US is out from 4G/LTE/5G game and US based companies are only component providers (Qualcomm and others).
>but nevertheless permitted it to compete for up to 35 percent market share in the country’s access network—that is, its antennae and similar equipment.
There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security. Mobile networks involve huge number of components. The components and the software in the mobile core network and services pose more risk than base stations. Interfaces are standardized and you can buy different components from different vendors.
European network operators (especially if they have government contracts) have silently limited what they buy from Huawei. Base stations and most hardware is OK. Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others. Many EU countries just "happen" to have one or two carriers with strategically shielded core networks without formally banning Huawei.