They are not. From the article:

>Yet Europe is home to two of the world’s leading vendors, Ericsson and Nokia; Samsung offers yet another alternative from a trustworthy democracy.

Though I'm not sure if they are more secure, they also have offices in China.

Why are there no US vendors?

It is rare to see a cutting-edge sector without the US.

Cisco and Motorola are not interested in this market, and Lucent is no longer American. To answer your question: maximizing shareholder value is why there are no US vendors (that in turn, might be because of lack of competition behavior between Verizon and AT&T leading to lowered investment in infrastructure)

No for example Swisscom in Switzerland is using Ericsson for their 5G network and Huawei for their IP core transport network. A lot of households got upgraded to Huawei G.Fast technology for example.

So it's also about price. Huawei is just cheaper than Nokia and Ericsson. I don't know how the technology of the different providers compare but it probably won't be that much of a difference. It probably also depends on your existing 4G infrastructure since 5G can sometimes be rolled out as a software upgrade using existing antennas. So if your existing infrastructure uses Huawei you don't want to switch.

What is the price point? Exactly how much cheaper is Huawei vs. Nokia/Ericsson?

Some rumors say that Huawei has 4,000 software engineers that they can throw at a problem, like their current goal to replace Google services.

If an average software engineer in China makes $10,000 USD, vs. an average software engineer at Google making $160,000 USD. Then Huawei will spend $40 million USD, vs. Google spending $640 million USD.

That’s a pretty significant difference. Huawei’s operating cost is 6% of Google’s.

Huawei can afford to throw a lot of human brain power at solving an engineering problem. And especially when a lot of Chinese companies are operating in start-up mode and working 60+ hours a week.

> an average software engineer at Google making $160,000 USD

Average software engineer at Google makes well over $200K USD.

It's the most viable at the lowest price point I believe. Other companies like Ericsson can also provide 5G but I think Huawei is furthest ahead yes. This has really been poor planning on the part of the UK government going back a few years - this decision has been coming for a long time but not enough effort seems to have gone into creating a better set of choices. Instead we are accepting Huawei despite believing they are a bad actor and only now starting to seriously plan for reducing our dependence on them.

Huawei is apparently just far and way cheaper.