Chinese telecoms firms in ban over US broadband
The Federal Communications Commission has said it was ordering the US units of China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile to discontinue fixed or mobile broadband internet operations in the United States.
The FCC said it was requiring the Chinese carriers to discontinue services within 60 days of the effective date of the net neutrality order approved on Thursday. The order also applies to Chinese telecoms firm Pacific Networks and its wholly owned subsidiary ComNet.
The commission previously had barred the companies from providing telecommunications services and those decisions were upheld by US courts.
FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the commission had evidence Chinese telecoms carriers were providing broadband services in the United States.
The FCC had cited national security concerns in revoking or denying Chinese companies the right to provide US telecoms services. It had said the firms were “subject to exploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government”.
The Chinese telecoms firms did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
FCC commissioner Geoffrey Starks said China Telecom’s website showed the company operated 26 so-called internet points of presence (POPs) in the US and offered colocation, broadband, IP transit and data centre services. The FCC cited national security concerns about Chinese access to POPs typically located within data centres. “They are interconnecting with other networks and have access to important points of presence and data centres,” Starks said, urging “a closer look at the threats that adversarial providers pose to our data and data centres”.
The FCC since 2022 has been studying vulnerabilities that it says threaten the security and integrity of the Border Gateway Protocol, central to the internet’s global routing system.
This is the latest action by Washington to restrict Chinese telecoms carriers, including on undersea cables handling internet traffic.
The FCC previously barred approvals of telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies and ZTE and other companies, saying they posed “an unacceptable risk” to US national security.