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04.10.20 telecommunications

When School Is Online, the Digital Divide Grows Greater

Like many students around the world, Nora Medina is adapting to online learning. But Medina, a high school senior in Quincy, Washington, who also takes classes at a local community college, faces an additional challenge: She doesn't have reliable internet service at home. She lives 7 miles outside of town where she says neither cable nor DSL internet is available.

She can access the internet on her phone, and her family has a wireless hot spot, but she says the service isn’t up to the task of doing homework online. "It's hit and miss," she says. "Sometimes I can watch a video, but sometimes I can't even refresh a page, or it will take minutes to load something on a page."

Washington governor Jay Inslee this week said the state’s schools will be closed for the rest of the school year. Quincy High School is still planning how best to help students finish the year. But Medina’s classes at Big Bend Community College have shifted online. "I'm just going to hope the hot spot works and wish for the best for my final quarter," she says. "If that doesn't work, I'll do my work from my car in the parking lot at the library to access their Wi-Fi."

Medina is one of millions of people in the US who lack reliable broadband internet at home, either because they can't afford it or because it simply isn't available where they live. This digital divide has always left children and adults alike with fewer educational and economic opportunities. But with schools, libraries, and workplaces closed during the coronavirus pandemic, those without broadband are struggling to access schoolwork, job listings, unemployment benefit applications, and video chat services that others use to keep in touch with friends and family. For those on the wrong side of the digital divide, working from home isn’t an option.

The Federal Communications Commission says more than 650 broadband internet providers, telephone companies, and trade associations have signed its Keep America Connected Pledge to not terminate internet service over pandemic-related financial troubles, to waive late fees, and to allow free access to Wi-Fi services. Comcast said it would offer free access to its broadband service for low-income households, normally priced at $10 a month, for 60 days, and Charter said it would offer free internet access for students for 60 days. But these offerings are available only in locations where those companies already provide service.

It's hard to gauge the extent of the problem. In a report last year, the FCC estimated that 21.3 million people had no access to broadband internet service at the end of 2017. But the report, based on self-reported data from broadband providers, considers an entire census block to have service if a single broadband provider claims to offer service anywhere within the census block, even if most homes within the area can't get service. Critics have long pointed out that this method likely underestimates the number of people without access to broadband.

A report published last year by Microsoft estimated that 162.8 million people in the US—about half the population—don't use broadband internet, whether because it’s unavailable where they live or they can’t or won’t pay for access. A survey commissioned by Microsoft and the National 4-H Council found that 20 percent of rural youth lack access to broadband at home, regardless of whether it's available where they live.

How Schools Are Coping

The digital divide creates a challenge for teachers and administrators who know some students can’t easily follow online lessons. Berkeley, California, schools closed in the middle of March, but the distinct didn’t begin online classes until Monday. In the interim, public schools superintendent Brent Stephens says officials had to work out how to accommodate special-needs students, adjust union contracts, and plan lessons for 16,000 students.

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But, Stephens says, “equity has been a concern” too. He estimates that about 5 percent of the district's students lack reliable internet access at home, and about 30 percent need devices suitable for online learning. He says the district has distributed more than 2,000 Chromebooks to students and ordered wireless hot spots for students who don't have reliable internet access at home, though it's not clear when those hot spots will be available. In the meantime, the district is still considering how to get learning resources to students without internet access.

Some schools are employing low-tech solutions. Bandon School District on Oregon’s southern coast plans to deliver and collect physical packets of learning materials and assignments to the 18 percent of students who superintendent Doug Ardiana says lacks internet at home.

Should I Stop Ordering Packages? (And Other Covid-19 FAQs)

Plus: What it means to “flatten the curve,” and everything else you need to know about the coronavirus.

By Meghan Herbst

When Oregon governor Kate Brown closed schools on March 12, Bandon schools sent out "supplemental" learning assignments that didn’t need to be returned. Now, schools will be closed for the rest of the school year, and schools are supposed to offer distance-learning programs, including graded assignments.

To prepare students for those assignments, teachers are filming lessons that students can watch from home over the internet. "It's a whole new thing," says Courtney Wehner, a third-grade teacher at Ocean Crest Elementary in Bandon. "I'm not used to hearing my voice recorded."

For students who lack internet access, the school will send packets of materials to their homes, either through the mail or with school bus drivers wearing protective gear. Students who can use them will get DVDs or thumb drives with the recorded lectures. Wehner says that includes all of her students. Others will have to depend on written materials.

Wehner says the parents of her students who lack broadband internet will take pictures of completed assignments with their phones and send them to her for grading. Students in the district who can’t return assignments that way will send completed assignments back with bus drivers or the postal service, and someone at their school, also wearing protective gear, will scan the assignments and upload them to a server that teachers can access from home. Teachers will review and correct the assignments and print them out, and the corrected assignments will go back to the students three days later.

A $20 Billion Fix for a $70 Billion Problem

The FCC has spent billions in recent years in the name of closing the digital divide. But that divide persists in part because the agency has repeatedly underestimated the scope of the problem, says FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “How do we know we’re sending money to the right places?” she asks.

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which replaced a previous initiative called the Connect America Fund, gives carriers money to build broadband in communities that lack access to connections of at least 10 megabits per second. It's set to send $20.4 billion over 10 years to carriers to expand rural broadband access. But John Windhausen Jr., executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, says the Fiber Broadband Association estimated last year that it will cost $70 billion to bring fiber-optic networks to 90 percent of the US by 2025.

Beyond the pledges from carriers to not cut off service, the FCC has permitted libraries and public schools to offer public Wi-Fi while the buildings are closed without risking FCC funds, and has moved to dedicate a large chunk of spectrum for unlicensed Wi-Fi use instead of auctioning off licenses for it; advocates say that could make it easier to provide wireless broadband services in rural or low-income areas.

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But critics say the FCC in recent years has impeded efforts to close the digital divide. Last year the FCC voted to auction off wireless spectrum that had been reserved for schools to the highest bidder, which Windhausen says will make it harder for schools, local governments, and nonprofits to use that spectrum to create their own wireless services.

The FCC in 2017 also halted the planned expansion of the Lifeline program, which has been subsidizing access to telecommunications services for low-income households since 1985. The Obama administration had expanded the program to include internet access. But one of Ajit Pai's first moves as FCC chair was to pause the expansion. In 2017 the agency published what’s known as a “notice of proposed rulemaking” that, in the name of cracking down on waste and fraud in the program, proposed limiting how much assistance Lifeline subscribers can receive and banning resellers from participating in the program; advocacy group Public Knowledge estimated that about 70 percent of Lifeline enrollees use resellers. The FCC has yet to publish a final version of the proposal.


Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/school-online-digital-divide-grows-greater/

07.19.19 telecommunications

That Global Ban on Huawei? Not So Much Anymore

For years the US government has warned the world that Chinese telecom giant Huawei is not to be trusted. Some governments agree: Australia and Japan have blocked Huawei gear from their next-generation 5G wireless networks.

But others, including US allies, disagree. A UK Parliament committee rejected a proposed ban on British telecom carriers using Huawei gear. "There are no technical grounds for excluding Huawei entirely from the UK's 5G or other telecommunications networks," UK Member of Parliament Norman Lamb, chair of the Science and Technology Committee, wrote in a letter explaining the committee's conclusions. The committee's decision follows the European Union's decision in March not to ban Huawei outright, but instead to ask member countries to assess the risks to their 5G networks.

Even the US appears to be easing up on Huawei. US government agencies are banned from doing business with carriers that use Huawei equipment. Last month, President Trump tweeted that he had agreed to allow US technology companies to sell products that don't threaten national security to Huawei, despite sanctions imposed against the company by the US Commerce Department in May. Last week Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross clarified that the government will grant licenses to US companies to sell products to Huawei on a case-by-case basis, but won't lift the restrictions on the company altogether.

That could be a major boon to both Huawei and US companies that sell to it, depending on how generous the department is in granting licenses. Both Huawei's telecommunication infrastructure equipment and its smartphones depend on US-made chips and software, such as the Google Play app store. Huawei bought $11 billion worth of products from the US last year, according to founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei. Ren said last month that US restrictions would cost the company $30 billion this year and next. He said the company is working to end its reliance on US companies by making its own chips and smartphone operating system, but that he also wants Huawei to buy from US suppliers if possible.

Still, Huawei reportedly is preparing to lay off hundreds of US employees of its subsidiary due to the US restrictions, according to The Wall Street Journal. Huawei did not respond to our request for comment.

And though the UK committee rejected a ban on Huawei equipment, carriers already exclude the company's gear from "core" parts of wireless networks. The committee recommended making this exclusion mandatory. Lamb's letter did not explain the reasoning for excluding the company from the core parts of networks but not other parts. The committee also said that, though there's no technical reason to ban Huawei gear, there might be ethical reasons to do so. Specifically, Lamb’s letter cites an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report that Huawei supplied equipment to surveil Uyghur Muslims in western China.

Still, the committee's investigation could have been much worse for Huawei. In March, a UK government organization tasked with evaluating the security of Huawei's products released a scathing report warning of serious security risks in the company's software. The group's report didn't accuse Huawei of deliberately creating "backdoors," but blamed the problems on issues with the company's "basic engineering competence and cyber security hygiene."

Lamb's letter acknowledged the security issues highlighted in the previous reports. But it points out that the UK government discovered these issues because Huawei allows the government to audit its proprietary source code. The government doesn't have similar access to code from other vendors, such as Ericsson and Nokia, so it's unable to say whether Huawei's products pose a greater threat than those made by other companies. The letter suggests considering the merits of establishing similar auditing programs for equipment from other companies.

Opening its code to government inspections is part of Huawei's strategy to regain trust around the world. The company opened its Brussels Cyber Security Transparency Centre last March to help assure EU institutions that its products are safe to use.


Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/global-ban-huawei-not-so-much/

06.14.19 telecommunications

Choosing the Wrong Lane in the Race to 5G

The chatter about 5G is everywhere. It’s a worldwide race. It’s a security challenge. It’s a geopolitical battle between the United States and China. By some accounts, 5G is already here; by others, true 5G is still years away.

There is more than a kernel of truth in this rhetorical excess. That’s because the next generation of essential infrastructure in this country will be built using wireless technology. As a result, the next iteration of wireless service—5G—is truly important for our future civic and commercial life. With as much as 100 times the speed as current generation wireless networks and reduced latency, we can use wireless data to enhance our interactions with the world around us and create new opportunities in manufacturing, transportation, health care, education, agriculture, and more. It will support new services that will drive economic growth and job creation for years to come.

However, lost in the glowing headlines is the fact the United States is making choices that will leave rural America behind. These choices will harm our global leadership in 5G and could create new challenges for the security of our networks.

Here’s why. The most important input in our new wireless world is spectrum, or the invisible airwaves that are used to send and receive the radio signals that power wireless communications. For decades, slices of spectrum have been reserved for different uses, from television broadcasting to military radar. But today demands on our airwaves have grown. So the Federal Communications Commission has been working to clear these airwaves of old uses and auction them so they can be repurposed for new 5G service.

But not all spectrum is created equal. The traditional sweet spot for wireless service has been in what we call low-band or mid-band spectrum. This is between 600 MHz and 3 GHz. For a long time, these airwaves were considered beachfront property because they send signals far. In other words, they cover wide areas but require little power to do so. This makes them especially attractive for service in rural areas, where technology that can reach more people with less infrastructure makes greater economic sense.

For 5G, however, the United States has focused on making high-band spectrum the core of its early 5G approach. These airwaves, known as “millimeter wave,” are way, way up there—above 24 GHz. They have never been used in cellular networks before, and for good reason—they don’t send signals very far and are easily blocked by walls. That means they are very expensive to build out. On the flip side, these airwaves offer a lot more capacity, which translates into ultrafast speeds.

The United States is alone in this mission to make millimeter wave the core of its domestic 5G networks. The rest of the world is taking a different approach. Other nations vying for wireless leadership are not putting high-band airwaves front and center now. Instead, they are focusing on building 5G networks with mid-band spectrum, because it will support faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous 5G deployment.

Take China, which allocated large swaths of mid-band spectrum for its carriers last year, clearing the way for deployment in a country that is also home to Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment supplier worldwide. South Korea and Australia wrapped up an auction of key mid-band spectrum last year. At roughly the same time, Spain and Italy held their own auctions for mid-band airwaves. Austria did the same earlier this year. Switzerland, Germany, and Japan also auctioned a range of mid-band spectrum just a few months ago.

The United States, however, has made zero mid-band spectrum available at auction for the 5G economy. Moreover, it has zero mid-band auctions scheduled.

This is a problem. By ceding international leadership when it comes to developing 5G in the mid-band, we miss the benefits of scale and face higher costs and interoperability challenges. It also means less security as other nations’ technologies proliferate. Indeed, the most effective thing the United States can do in the short term to enhance the security of 5G equipment is make mid-band spectrum available, which will spur a broader market for more secure 5G equipment that will also benefit other countries that are pursuing mid-band deployments.

By auctioning only high-band spectrum, we also risk worsening the digital divide that already plagues so many rural communities in the United States. That’s because recent commercial launches of 5G service across the country are confirming what we already know—that commercializing millimeter wave will not be easy or cheap, given its propagation challenges. The network densification these airwaves require is substantial. In fact, recent tests of newly launched commercial 5G networks in the United States are showing that millimeter wave signals are not traveling more than 350 feet, even when there are no major obstructions. They are also not penetrating walls or windows, making indoor coverage difficult.

This means that high-band 5G service is unlikely outside of the most populated urban areas. The sheer volume of antenna facilities needed make this service viable makes it too costly to deploy in rural areas. So if we want to serve everywhere—and not create communities of 5G haves and have-nots—we are going to need a mix of airwaves that provide both coverage and capacity. That means we need mid-band spectrum. For rural America to see competitive 5G in the near future, we cannot count on high-band spectrum to get the job done.

The heat-seeking headlines about 5G are hard to resist. But the reality on the ground needs attention, too. For the United States to have secure 5G service available to everyone, everywhere, we need to stop going at it alone with millimeter wave spectrum. We need to make it a priority to auction mid-band airwaves right now. The longer we wait, the further behind the United States will fall—and the less likely our rural communities will see the benefits of next generation of wireless technology.

WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here. Submit an op-ed at opinion@wired.com


Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/choosing-the-wrong-lane-in-the-race-to-5g/

06.13.19 telecommunications

State Attorneys General Sue to Block T-Mobile/Sprint Merger

Nine states and the District of Columbia filed suit Tuesday to block T-Mobile and Sprint's planned $26.5 billion merger, complicating the companies’ path to completing the deal.

The merger would cut the number of major wireless carriers in the US from four to three, but the two companies have argued the deal would help consumers by enabling the companies to expand coverage and build a nationwide 5G network more quickly than they would be able to on their own.

Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai voiced his support for the merger last month after T-Mobile and Sprint promised to spin off Sprint's prepaid service Boost Mobile if the merger is approved. The two companies have also pledged not to raise prices for three years and to expand rural coverage by building a 5G wireless network that will cover 97 percent of the US population within three years and 99 percent of the country within six years.

But an investigation by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin concluded that the promises won't make up for the reduced competition in the market. The lawsuit argues that intense competition between T-Mobile and Sprint has led to lower prices for consumers; that a promise not to raise prices isn't a promise to further lower prices; and that the combined company would have every incentive to raise prices and reduce quality. The suit says an analysis based on estimates by the companies’ own economists suggests the merger would cost T-Mobile and Sprint subscribers $4.5 billion annually. The states also worry the merger would result in layoffs at retail stores.

"The T-Mobile and Sprint merger would not only cause irreparable harm to mobile subscribers nationwide by cutting access to affordable, reliable wireless service for millions of Americans, but would particularly affect lower-income and minority communities here in New York and in urban areas across the country," New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. "This is exactly the sort of consumer-harming, job-killing megamerger our antitrust laws were designed to prevent."

According to the suit, T-Mobile plans to decommission a number of Sprint cell sites and hasn't provided information on plans to expand coverage in areas that are not already covered by T-Mobile and Sprint. A statement from the New York attorney general's office argues that carriers built 4G networks in a highly competitive market and "continued competition, not concentration, is most likely to spur rapid development of a nationwide 5G network and other innovations."

In a statement, Carri Bennet, general counsel for the Rural Wireless Association, called the merger "bad for competition, and it is bad for consumers, especially those living in or traveling through rural areas.” She said the FCC’s review of the deal “has not been transparent, and the FCC appears to be blindly accepting New T-Mobile’s words as truth."

T-Mobile and Sprint did not respond to request for comment.

In addition to FCC approval, T-Mobile and Sprint need approval from the Department of Justice. Bloomberg reports that the department wants more concessions from the companies to bless the deal, such as spinning off enough divisions to create a new fourth carrier.

Randy Gordon, an antitrust attorney at Barnes & Thornburg, says states typically work with the DOJ or the Federal Trade Commission to bring antitrust cases, but they have authority to challenge mergers under the federal Clayton Antitrust Act. If the states' suit is successful, that would stop the deal.

The suit is another example of how states are pushing for stricter oversight of the telecommunications industry than the FCC. In early 2018, a coalition of 21 states filed suit against the FCC in an attempt to block the agency's decision to jettison its net neutrality rules, forbidding internet providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful content. A federal court held a hearing on the case in February but hasn’t issued a ruling yet.

Several states, including California, New Jersey, and Washington, passed their own state-level net neutrality protections, though California's law remains on hold while the federal court mulls the suit against the FCC. California also passed a data privacy law last year over the objections of broadband providers.


Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/state-attorneys-general-sue-block-t-mobilesprint-merger/

05.30.19 telecommunications

FCCs broadband deployment report called fundamentally at odds with reality

The FCC has officially issued this year’s Broadband Deployment Report, summarizing the extent to which the agency and industry have closed the digital divide in this country. But not everyone agrees with it: “The rosy picture the report paints about the status of broadband deployment is fundamentally at odds with reality,” said Geoffrey Starks in a lengthy dissenting statement.

The yearly report, mandated by Congress, documents things like new broadband customers in rural areas, broadband expanding to new regions and all that sort of thing. The one issued today proclaims cheerfully:

[The FCC] has made closing the digital divide between Americans with, and without, access to modern broadband networks its top priority. As a result of those efforts, the digital divide has narrowed substantially, and more Americans than ever before have access to high-speed broadband.

We find, for a second consecutive year, that advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis.

Naturally the FCC wants to highlight the progress made rather than linger on failures, but this year the latter are highly germane, as Starks points out, largely because one error in particular threw off the results by millions.

FCC ‘looking into’ reported error throwing broadband deployment numbers off by millions

The statistics in the report are based on forms filled out by broadband providers, which seem to go unchecked even in the case of massive outliers. Barrier Free broadband reported having gone from zero subscribers in March of 2017 to,  seven months later, serving the entirety of New York state’s 62 million residents with state of the art gigabit fiber connections. There are so many things wrong with this filing that the freshest intern at the Commission should have flagged it as suspect.

Instead, the data was accepted as gospel, and only a full year later did reporters at Free Press notice the discrepancy and call it to the FCC’s attention.

That this error, so enormous in scope, so obvious and so consequential (it skewed the national numbers by large amounts), was not detected, and once detected was only cursorily addressed, leaves Starks flabbergasted:

The fact that a 2019 Broadband Deployment Report with an error of over 62 million connections was circulated to the full Commission raises serious questions. Was the Chairman’s office aware of the errors when it circulated the draft report? If not, why didn’t an “outlier” detection function raise alarms with regard to Barrier Free? Also, once the report was corrected, the fact that such a large number of connections came out of the report’s underlying data without changing the report’s conclusion, and without resulting in a substantial charge to the report, calls into question the extent to which the report and its conclusions depend on and flow from data.

In other words, if the numbers can change that much and the conclusions stay the same, what exactly are the conclusions based on?

Starks is the latest Commissioner to be appointed and one of the two Democrats there, the other being Jessica Rosenworcel (the Commission maintains a 3:2 party balance in favor of the current administration). Both have been outspoken in their criticism of the way the Broadband Deployment Report is researched and issued.

It’s the same data used to create the FCC’s broadband map, which ostensibly shows which carriers and speeds are available in your area. But the issues with this are many and various.

The data is only broken down by census tract, a unit that varies a great deal in size — some are tiny, some enormous. Yet if one company provides service to one person in that tract, it is considered “served” with that broadband capability throughout. The resulting map is so full of inaccuracies as to be useless, many argue — including Microsoft, which recently said it had observed “significant discrepancies across nearly all counties in all 50 states.”

Microsoft says its data shows FCC reports massively overstate broadband adoption

The good news is that the FCC is aware of this and currently working on ways to improve data gathering. In future years better rules or more location-specific reporting could make the maps and deployment report considerably better. But at present, Starks concludes, “I don’t believe that we know what the state of broadband deployment is in the U.S. with sufficient accuracy.”

Commissioner Rosenworcel was similarly unsparing in her dissent.

“This report deserves a failing grade,” she wrote. “Putting aside the embarrassing fumble of the FCC blindly accepting incorrect data for the original version of this report, there are serious problems with its basic methodology. Time and again this agency has acknowledged the grave limitations of the data we collect to assess broadband deployment.”

The data also do not address problems that are unlikely to be addressed in forms filled out by the industry, such as redlining, shady business practices and high prices for the broadband that is available.

“We will never manage problems we do not measure,” she continued. “Our ability to address the challenge of uneven internet access across the country is only made more challenging by our inability to be frank about the state of deployment today. Moreover, we need to be thoughtful about how impediments to adoption, like affordability, are an important part of the digital equity equation and our national broadband challenge.”

The Republican Commissioners, Brendan Carr and Michael O’Rielly, supported the report and did not mention the systematic data sourcing problems or indeed the enormous error that caused the draft of this report to be totally off base. O’Rielly did have an objection, however. He is “dismayed by the report’s reliance on purported ‘insufficient evidence’ as a basis for maintaining—for yet another year in a row—an outdated siloed approach to evaluating fixed and mobile broadband, rather than examining both markets as one.”

This has been suggested before and is a dangerously bad idea.

It should be said that the report isn’t one big single error. There’s more to it than just repackaging the aspirational numbers of the telecoms industry — though that’s a big part. It still holds interesting data that can be used in apples-to-apples comparisons to previous years. But more than ever it sounds like that data and any conclusions made from it — or for that matter rules or legislation — should be taken with a grain of salt.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/fccs-broadband-deployment-report-called-fundamentally-at-odds-with-reality/

04.28.19 telecommunications

Huawei Still Has Friends in Europe, Despite US Warnings

US Secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned US allies in February against using technology built by Chinese telecom giant Huawei, going so far as to suggest the US might stop sharing intelligence with countries whose communications infrastructures rely on Huawei’s equipment.

Pompeo's remarks during a European speaking tour echoed years of concerns from the US government over the possibility that Huawei might use its products to help China spy on US citizens. Huawei has repeatedly denied that it has spied or would spy on US citizens on behalf of China, and it sued the US government over a law banning government agencies from doing business with companies that buy gear from Huawei and its fellow Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

But some big European countries aren’t toeing Uncle Sam’s line. On Wednesday, The Telegraph reported that the UK government will allow Huawei to build "non-core" parts of its 5G network.

“The UK initial decision is a mixed bag for both Huawei and the US,” says Paul Triolo, who focuses on technology for the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group. Huawei didn’t get banned entirely, Triolo points out, but “for the US it shows that its security concerns are being listened to.”

The UK is intimately familiar with Huawei's equipment, because the company allows British officials to inspect its code. Last month, a UK governmental agency released a scathing report criticizing Huawei's basic security practices. However, it concluded that these issues were related to "basic engineering competence and cyber security hygiene," not deliberate attempts to build backdoors into its products.

Germany isn't ready to kick Huawei out of its networks yet either. Earlier this month Jochen Homann, the president of Germany's federal network agency, told the Financial Times that his agency "has not received any concrete indications against Huawei." Last month the agency announced a set of security requirements for telecommunications networks that apply to all companies, not just Huawei. "If Huawei meets all the requirements, it can take part in the 5G network roll-out," Homann told the Financial Times.

Last month the European Union asked member states to complete security risk assessments of their 5G network infrastructures by the end of June, but it did not propose a ban on Huawei or other Chinese vendors.

Triolo says an EU meeting next week in Prague on 5G security will provide a better indication of the bloc’s view of Huawei. He says European government and telecom carriers are in a tough spot because their networks include a lot of Chinese gear.

"European governments are just reacting to the reality on the ground," says mobile industry analyst Chetan Sharma. He says Huawei is “well entrenched” in existing 4G wireless networks on the continent, and would be expensive to replace. “If you are going to have 4G gear from Huawei, it just makes sense to have their 5G gear as well, as there are financial incentives that can’t be overlooked. Neither the operators or the governments have the funding to replace Huawei in the networks." Sharma also points out that relationships between the US and the EU have deteriorated, and the US' warnings might not carry the same weight they once did.

Losing Germany and the UK would have been a major blow to Huawei, which is facing more scrutiny around the world. Last year Australia and Japan effectively banned Chinese vendors from building 5G networks, and Taiwan reinforced an existing ban on the companies' networking gear.

Despite these bans, Huawei has continued making deals. Huawei had signed 40 contracts to supply 5G gear by the end of March, the company's rotating chairman, Ken Hu, said at the company's global analyst summit earlier this month, according to Reuters. Of these contracts, 23 were in Europe, 10 were in the Middle East, six were in Asia-Pacific, and one was in Africa. In a sign of health, Huawei reported a 39 percent increase in first-quarter revenue on Monday.

Huawei has more to worry about than government bans. Earlier this year the US indicted Huawei and its executives, including CFO Meng Wanzhou, of crimes including bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice related to alleged violations of sanctions forbidding the sale of US-made equipment to Iran. Meng was arrested in Canada last year and is awaiting extradition to the US. If convicted, Huawei could face sanctions banning US companies from selling it software and components. Similar sanctions nearly forced ZTE out of business last year, but the company was saved when the Trump administration dropped the sanctions. Huawei might be better able to survive sanctions than ZTE was, but it would seriously curb the company's ambitions.


Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-friends-europe-despite-us-warnings/

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