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Comment by corporate_shi11 | Hacker News Reader

It's not just about privacy and security. It's about not entangling your communications infrastructure with a Chinese company that - like all Chinese companies - is completely beholden to and embedded in the framework of CCP governance.

Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.

We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.

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There is no vendor lock in in mobile network infrastructure. Everything is standardized trough and trough. You can buy components from different suppliers and they work together.

>Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.

Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.

I don’t think anyone is saying they can’t purchase from someone other than Huawei. They’re saying that they aren’t purchasing from someone other than Huawei (at least for some proportion of the network which is, obviously, manufactured by Huawei).

Vendor lock-in is not the issue. If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware (which is obviously insanely optimistic), that’s a problem. Wars have been won and lost with much less than 6 months of technological/infrastructural head start.

> If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware

Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.

No matter how powerful a nation-state is, it would still be infinitely easier for them to exploit a known CVE by sanctioning a patch than it would be to find a zero day chain that works.

Also, it would afford them the additional political benefit of deniability in their attack.

The nationality of the worker-bees is completely irrelevant when they don't show up because of sanctions or a shift in corporate policies.

>>There is no vendor lock in in mobile network infrastructure. Everything is standardized trough and trough. You can buy components from different suppliers and they work together.

There technically isn't, but 3GPP standardized interfaces leave enough room for there to be a smoother deployment and operational efficiencies gained from a single vendor deploying RAN and Core together. Few suppliers can do this -- Huawei is one of them.

>>Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.

Maybe this is region specific, but I believe most (all?) initial Huawei deployments are performed by Chinese nationals working directly for Huawei. To your point, maintenance (i.e. post-deployment, live production) can be a mix of foreign company employees and Chinese nationals.

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