Huawei is a pretty divisive brand. They make pretty great phones, and they consistently take top marks in camera competitions for smartphones. They also tend to exist in a gray area when it comes to corporate espionage and their relationship with the Chinese government.
Some new allegations have surfaced that apparently Huawei was able to eavesdrop on cellular network communications as far back as 2010, which is exactly what you do not want when a company is entangled so deeply with China’s government.
Huawei snooping?
The report comes a Dutch newspaper and notes that Huawei had the ability to listen in on all conversations on the KPN Network, which is also a Dutch service. It’s not a small network, either, and had around 6.5 million subscribers at the time. That’s a huge bucket of people for a company to be listening in on.
And this isn’t related to Huawei phones, obviously, but instead from their cellular network equipment that carriers use to build out their coverage. It’s easy to focus on Huawei phones because they’re so consumer facing, but all of these recent allegations and rumors have seriously damaged the cell equipment portion of Huawei’s business, especially since we’re right on the cusp of 5G networks starting to build out.
This report is going to pretty significantly damage Huawei’s chances of getting to be the supplier for 5G networks around the world. The US has already been trying to distance from the OEM, but now the UK seems to be paying a lot of attention to this potential scandal, and other countries are bound to follow suit with scrutiny.
Huawei denies doing anything wrong, and they claim they never had unauthorized access to the network and they’ve never extracted data from the network. That response feels pretty carefully worded, however, and still leaves room for the possibility of Huawei being able to eavesdrop on the network, even if they never explicitly used that ability.
Tough break.
source: The Telegraph
