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'You Need To Be Very, Very Cautious': US Warns European Allies Not To Use Chinese Gear For 5G Networks (reuters.com)
The United States sees the European Union as its top priority in a global effort to convince allies not to buy Huawei equipment for next-generation mobile networks, a U.S. State Department Official said on Tuesday. From a report: After meetings with the European Commission and the Belgian government in Brussels, U.S. officials are set to take a message to other European capitals that the world's biggest telecommunications gear maker poses a security risk, said the official, who declined to be named. "We are saying you need to be very, very cautious and we are urging folks not to rush ahead and sign contracts with untrusted suppliers from countries like China," the official said. The United States fears China could use the equipment for espionage -- a concern that Huawei Technologies says is unfounded. The push to sideline Huawei in Europe, one of its biggest markets, is likely to deepen trade frictions between Washington and Beijing.
Ericsson (Sweden) is another very major player...
How about these:
https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/backdoor-found-in-chinese-tenda.html
https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/hardcoded-backdoor-found-in-china-made_27.html
Or these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/a4b11x/spiegel_a_backdoor_was_found_in_huawei_network/
https://www.isssource.com/backdoor-found-in-chinese-router/
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1acqc9/chinese_routers_from_tplink_are_found_to_have_a/
Let me know if you need any more.
It will be VERY, and I mean VERY hard to avoid the chinese in 5G rollouts.
For telecom gear, worldwide, there are only four big guys. All the other are very small players (in telco space).
Those are:
Ericsson (sweeden)
Nokia* (Finland, germany,france,US, and a little more US to boot).
Huawei (China)
ZTE (China).
Of all the 4, Huaweis is the one that has the most complete portfolio for 5G things.
Al the other players are rather small, say samsung with some basestations and optical telecom gear, NEC with some switches.
Having said that, mobile operators would be dumb to depend on one provider alone, and rarely do.
Mobile Operators have certain strategies in place since the dawn of time to mitigate this type of risk.
For example, in RF you divide the country, say 70-30, 60-40 or 50-25-25 (depending of the size of the country) and assign each region to a different basestation provider. If one of those providers drops the ball (say, by spying on you), you eject them with prejudice. This can also be done in other access technologies, like the DSLAMs in de case of ADSL/VDSL/G.fast. Telefonica/Movistar is one of the operators that does this.
Other Example, Some operators have what they call provider uniformity in different layers, so, for example, British Telecom uses Huawei gear in the optical transport layer (DWDM). As soon as they bought EE, they ripped all Huawei Switches from the mobile network (of course, they also ripped also all optical equipment that was not Huawei, and replaced it with Huawei equipment). Since all the data is encripted end-to-end, good luck with the optical equipment doing much spying.
Other techniques exist. So, if an operator (or a country) are concerned about "Chinese Spying", they may as well use chinese gear only in the areas less succeptible to spying. That way you get all the advantages of chinese providers (low cost, easy mass deployment), and lessen the impact on security.
I have to say that, in general, the more sucess Huawei and ZTE had in the international scene, the less spying they do. Anecdoticaly, the last case I heard about was in the late 00's or early 10's (can remember exactly), when some guys with some operator in LatAm caught a mobile switch beaconing china. A big hoopla ensued, Huawei profusely appologized, swore, crossed their hearts and hope to die never to do it again. Those switches were put under close observation for years, as well as other Huawei gear in other countries (this operator operates in multiples countries), and so far more or less a decade later, no other incidents to report... (If the non Anon Coward comentators can tell us more, jump right in. My NDA was over a few years ago, I you still are under NDA, do not post, anon or not).
As many have said, thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that the NSA and the five eyes were tampering with western gear to spy. So for many countries, in particular countries in LatAm, Asia, Africa and the middle east, you will either be spied by the 5 eyes or by the chinese, since we do not care one way or the other, let the most cost effective gear win and spay us all.
* Nokia (from finland, not japan) is the voltron of telecom, having borged Siemens telecoms arm (Germany), Alcatel(france)-Lucent(US), and the Mobile gear arm of motorola(US) (the cellphone arm went to google, and from there to lenovo, and the motorola that remain today is the goverment and emergency services comunications arm)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Most casualties in war across all of human history have been in wars involving China (usually on both sides). The current (unified) borders of China were arrived at through more bloodshed than all other nations combined. Every square foot of what is now China is a place where China forced a regime change - generally several in the course of history.
Communists dictators have killed about 160 million people, BTW, even before the war death tolls.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The current President of the United States of America described the EU as his country's "biggest foe globally". Why would one dispense advice to a foe? The US might as well counsel their new allies, such as Putin, who went to great lengths to help their current President get elected.
The United States are known to lie to their allies in order to promote their national interests, and for this reason their word has no value. Besides, they were caught doing exactly what they are now accusing the Chinese of: by preferring US gear to Chinese gear, Europe would be exchanging possible espionage with certain espionage.