Huawei is a microcosm of Chinese ascendancy
Huawei is now the world leader in ultra-high bandwidth comms; PAM4/PAM8, 400GbE ++, massive-SDN, fibre, wireless, free-space optical. They either run or significantly contribute IP to all the relevant IEEE forums. While still closed source, they show code to any government afraid they're the devil incarnate.
Any Reg reader should know intelligence services have access to decap their custom ASICs, take a photomicrograph of the die and work out what it's doing at the gate level. Phoning home to Beijing is easily detected by deep packet inspection, but we all know that's not what it's all about.
It's simply protectionist and political. Huawei pricing is putting a serious dent into the Arista, Cisco, Juniper and HPs of the world, but the really scary part is that Western agencies are now being limited in their ability to insert their own intelligence gathering exploits at the lowest possible level, and on international networks where they don't have friendly/compliant telcos to help/force.
Huawei's ascendancy is mostly symbolic - the West is in a financial mess, but China soon will be, or already is the global economic superpower. That to many in the US/EU politics and business communities is simply inconceivable, but it's a fact and it's never going back.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
