Lets be quite blunt about this.... The western world has spent the best part of a decade or more pulling Huawei kit to pieces in anyway possible to look for security weaknesses or spyware, and no-one has yet found anything substantial or significant, apart from the usual crop of bad practices and sloppy coding.
Were any other manufacturers kit subject to the same analysis it would no doubt show up lots of issues.
Britain has no ability to use "home grown" system as we do not make any - we allowed all our tech companies - Marconi, STC, Ferranti, Pye, Plesey, etc., to go down the tubes. Hence we must use European (Alcatel/Ericsson/Nokia/Siemens) or American kit. The Americans would love us to use theirs, and through the patriot act, their companies are as obliged to co-operate with the US government on export matters as much as any chinese company is obliged to co-operate with the chinese government.
The fear the Americans have over Chinese kit is almost certainly that they have no backdoor access to it, unlike their own exported kit, nor can they mandate that backdoors are incorporated. At a second level, they fear the kit because it is cheaper and better than anything they make, so taking skilled jobs and revenue away from them.
What is really worrying about a bunch of MP's discussing this, is that none of them have any clue about any of this. For instance, the defence committee website referred to in the article states that Huawei will not be prohibited from supplying less critical items like antennae and masts. Perhaps someone should explain to them that a mast is (nominally) a collection of welded steel tubes arranged in a latticework and performs no security function other than holding the antennae in the air. Without demeaning our cousins in the civil/structural engineering field, it's not exactly hi-tech or rocket science. And I suspect Huawei do not even supply or care about supplying masts. This one statement alone on the parliament website conveys the fact they have no understanding of what they are talking about.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
