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The Chinese Telecom That Spooks the World
wrekkuh writes "The Economist has printed an interesting look at the concerns and speculations of the fast-growing Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and its spread into western markets. Of particular concern is Huawei's state funding, and the company's founder, Ren Zhengfei, who once served as an engineer in the People's Liberation Army (PLA). However, another article from The Economist goes into greater detail about the steps Huawei has taken to mitigate some of these concerns in England — including co-operating with the GCHQ in Britain, the UK's signals-intelligence agency, to ensure equipment built by Huawei is not back-doored."
The Reason the US is concerned about other countries using telecommunication equipment for spying is because they have done it already. A lot.
If you don't want to be spied on, encrypt it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
ZDNet, CNN.
I work for a telco supplier, so have had glimpses into the weird world of what happens behind the shonky service and bills.
Huawei when they started out produced kit that was 'very similar' to Cisco. Now you suggest that perhaps they were paying too much homage to their US competitor, but it did mean their kit was pretty easy to deploy. You can setup a VPN in IOS, you can switch to Huawei kit and barely notice the difference.
Next bit of their success was how they engaged with the customer. Legacy vendors have whole stacks of sales all hell-bent on shafting the telco for as much money as possible. Huawei wanted a foothold, kit was cheaper, but they really put in some effort to push the sale - Buy your new network from us, and we'll let you buy it on lease over a decade, our engineers will install/config/support it for you, we'll tweak stuff if it currently doesn't do what you want etc. Legacy vendors might have got a bit of a kicking from the dot.com crash, but they still dragged in the overly-complex vendor structure that makes that makes the proposal of similar flexible solutions somewhat difficult. Simply meant that if you were a small player with a valid business model, picking Huawei allowed you to very easily work out what the kit was going to cost you.
With regards to spying, if they were, it wouldn't be let anywhere near the tier zeros. As far as I can make out, there's no real evidence of China using Huawei to spy and most of the allegations come from the incumbents/vested interests, trying to come up with a reason to oppose the shift in purchasing.
If you're worried about back-doors - don't. They're already everywhere. I've been in plenty of offices which have the 'special room' that everything has to go through and telco employees don't even have the keys to. So just to carry on with this, if your kit DOESN'T have a back-door, it ain't going to be deployed. The only real topic of interest is just working out who holds the back-door-keys.