Huawei: Separating fact from fiction – Network World

Chinese telecom provider Huawei was hardly a household word a few months ago, but it’s had lots of negative publicity of late,
from an Economist cover story to a 60 Minutes piece.

And now the US House Intelligence Committee has issued a report recommending that Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese telecom company, be viewed “with suspicion.”

Huawei customers defend their security after congressional report

As the president of a third-party test lab, I’ve had some experience dealing with Huawei, its competitors, and its customers.
And as a U.S. history buff, I’m also aware that this is hardly the first attempt to drum up fear of “The Other” in the name
of patriotism and national security.

While some claims about Huawei are valid, others are unsupported. Let’s sort through these. (I’m focusing on Huawei here because
I know it better than ZTE.)

1. Huawei is succeeding because of Chinese government backing.

This is true. Beijing is a huge customer and subsidizer of Huawei’s development efforts.

Then again, Huawei has lots of company. Toyota’s popular Prius wouldn’t have happened without a hand from the Japanese government.
Airbus and its majority shareholder EADS wouldn’t exist if Western European governments hadn’t encouraged defense contractors
to merge.

We have hugely successful public/private endeavors in the U.S., too. Some of our most important scientific and engineering
achievements – things like atomic energy, space travel, human genome mapping, and the Internet itself – came out of government
research programs.

The problem we have is too little R&D spending, not too much. Scream about waste all you want, but there’s a baby/bathwater
problem here. There’s been a long-term slump in U.S. R&D funding while China is increasing its funding 10% year over year. We’re not doing enough R&D spending to keep pace.

2. Buying Huawei is unpatriotic; it means replacing U.S. gear with Chinese stuff.

All telecom providers, including U.S. ones like Cisco, make at least some gear in China.

It’s true that Huawei’s profits go back to China. Then again, it’s also common practice for U.S.-based multinationals not
to “repatriate” their overseas profits for tax reasons.

This goes beyond factory locations. All major networking companies are multinationals, and all their engineering groups look
like the United Nations. This can complicate matters for U.S. companies holding defense contracts with citizenship and security-clearance
requirements.

Ironically, some manufacturers are scaling back in China as wages rise. These days we see more components coming into the
lab from places like Malaysia and Vietnam.

3. Huawei doesn’t care about intellectual property rights.

Huawei tried to enter the U.S. market a decade ago with an effort that would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so ham-handed.

Visitors to Interop 2002 Las Vegas saw the Huawei booth next to Cisco’s, with Huawei routers like the 2600, 3600, 4700, and
12000 GSR on display, all in Cisco’s familiar olive paint. Although the Huawei command-line interface (CLI) said “HOS,” it
had the same bugs as a contemporary IOS release.