> The Huawei problem
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is statistically the biggest player in the 5G market, offering some of the most affordable hardware available for the large–scale infrastructure deployment that’s required in its rollout. It is also among the most controversial players in the game: the company is accused of “phoning home”, with some of its devices sending mysterious data streams back to cloud servers operated by China’s Ministry of Public Security. This is an understandable concern – one which some security organizations have branded as spying – and adding this to the currently tough trade relationship between the US and China means Huawei is currently turba non grata.
That said, it’s a fluid and turbulent relationship. In May 2019, Donald Trump placed sanctions on Huawei, limiting the business it is allowed to do with US companies — affecting Huawei’s handset business and its enterprise hardware. Then the company was given various extensions on its ban, allowing it to release new handsets and continue trading though many US companies (notably Google) are maintaining a personal ban and the US has extended the sanctions to some 46 Huawei affiliates.
The crucial point here is that Huawei’s place in building the 5G backbone of the country — a task estimated by Bloomberg to cost upwards of $200 billion per year, and one for which the US currently has no home–grown company capable of competing — currently stands at “unlikely” at best. But perhaps it has a way back in: at press time, the company has just offered to share the entirety of its 5G know–how with western firms for a licensing fee, offering them the chance to build competing hardware without any possibility of a sneaky backdoor to China. Huawei’s claim is that this will help create parity between the US, China and Europe — but an image boost in the States can’t hurt it either...