Proposed US Senate bill would hand $700M to rural telecoms to avoid Huawei & ZTE
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators have proposed a bill that would hand $700 million in grants to rural telecom providers to cover the cost of stripping Huawei and ZTE gear from their networks.
Those networks would also be blocked from using Huawei or ZTE equipment for 5G infrastructure, Reuters reported. The bill is being sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS). Warner is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, while Wicker is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The proposed sum may not be enough to offset the expense of swapping out Huawei and ZTE gear. The Rural Wireless Association claims that while just 25% of its members might be affected, their costs could run between $800 million and $1 billion.
The Trump administration was been concerned about Huawei and ZTE's links with the Chinese government, arguing they could lead to backdoors into U.S. networks. State-backed hackers regularly probe U.S. companies and government agencies.
Along those lines the White House has not only blocked government agencies from doing business with the firms, but recently banned private companies from buying their telecoms equipment, and stopped Huawei from buying components from American sources. The latter restrictions were eased on Monday, but only temporarily.
ZTE was fined over $1 billion in March 2017 for violating sanctions on selling parts to Iran and North Korea. In April 2018, the Federal Communications Commission blocked ZTE's access to parts and software.
Huawei and the Chinese government been vocal in protesting recent actions, suggesting that the White House is wielding national security as a pretense for suppressing a major competitor to American companies in the context of a wider trade war. Indeed Huawei is the leading smartphone vendor in China, easily dwarfing not just Apple but local rivals like Oppo and Xiaomi.
Those networks would also be blocked from using Huawei or ZTE equipment for 5G infrastructure, Reuters reported. The bill is being sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS). Warner is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, while Wicker is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The proposed sum may not be enough to offset the expense of swapping out Huawei and ZTE gear. The Rural Wireless Association claims that while just 25% of its members might be affected, their costs could run between $800 million and $1 billion.
The Trump administration was been concerned about Huawei and ZTE's links with the Chinese government, arguing they could lead to backdoors into U.S. networks. State-backed hackers regularly probe U.S. companies and government agencies.
Along those lines the White House has not only blocked government agencies from doing business with the firms, but recently banned private companies from buying their telecoms equipment, and stopped Huawei from buying components from American sources. The latter restrictions were eased on Monday, but only temporarily.
ZTE was fined over $1 billion in March 2017 for violating sanctions on selling parts to Iran and North Korea. In April 2018, the Federal Communications Commission blocked ZTE's access to parts and software.
Huawei and the Chinese government been vocal in protesting recent actions, suggesting that the White House is wielding national security as a pretense for suppressing a major competitor to American companies in the context of a wider trade war. Indeed Huawei is the leading smartphone vendor in China, easily dwarfing not just Apple but local rivals like Oppo and Xiaomi.
Comments
Seems fair.
Side request Apple Insiders, can you please block web traffic from China? I can’t speak for everyone, but their posts are obnoxious and fanatical. We didn’t go to their forum, they came here, creating unproductive geopolitical discourse.
The USA is far from perfect, but we all get a voice in the process. We can speak our minds, share opinions, and join a movement, all without fear.
They don’t get to lecture us after passing on the greatest IP ever, freedom and Liberty.
Works both ways. Just imagine the anger brewing in China among average citizens against the US....
So, while American families will now be paying an extra almost $900 a year for the so called protection, our government wants to hand out free money to rural areas. Mostly red zones. But where is it coming from since we already can't pay our bills? Maybe China will lend us some more? Please Mr Xi?
Myself, I'm not big on letting an oppressive, murderous, single-party, authoritarian regime manager the world's communications equipment. And since this company is "effectively an arm of the Chinese state" the decision seems pretty prudent. I'm no fan of our crappy president, but I have no reason to doubt the six US intelligence agencies who briefed the Senate security committee. These are the same agencies that said Russia interfered in our election to benefit Trump, and I believed them then. Not believing them now would be intellectually dishonest. (something our communist apologists excel at, lol)
Who do you think is promoting this compensation to the telecoms? The telecom lobbyists and their paid-for politicians. It’s not like the telecoms cannot afford to pay for the changes themselves. Well, their top shareholders and executives could afford it, but they’re not going to let go of any of their insane pay to cover operational expenses. So they're going to call on handouts from the very same entities who just caused them a huge expense. The paranoid government officials, and the paranoid corporatists who never have enough profit and who expect perpetual growth and shareholder value, are largely one and the same: shortsighted game-players (only our society is their game and many of us don’t appreciate that).
As with most things in this administration, it’s really a self-inflicted injury from the top. Take a short-sighted action, then enact bandaids to fix the problem created by that action, compounding the problem. These people are not just lacking practical experience; they don’t even understand much of the theory, and certainly not to any depth.
Welfare for humans struggling in this awful system? No way. Can’t have that. Corporate welfare bailing out banks (and automotive companies, and telecoms, and etc) that intentionally drove the system toward failure? Oh that’s a must. “Too big to fail”, right?
More like “too big to not fail”.
Don’t worry, I know the waste industry is the REAL problem there, but American culture around recycling and material usage (and waste management) is utterly shameful. The people act like it’s some kind of infringement on their freedom when they’re told not to waste things and told to separate reusable materials. Lazy and repugnant. That’s our CULTURE.
China won’t take our waste materials anymore because America SUCKS at recycling. We did that to ourselves. The companies here have found it more profitable to cheat on recycling (single-stream collection is a disaster, burning is cheap and makes profit via abusive contracts between incinerator builders and local government), and our governance over this stuff has been utterly absent. The state DEP is merely a department of emissions permitting, not environmental protection.
Laissez-faire capitalism is what people demanded, and abuse and systemic decay is what they get as a result. But the 1% are doing better than ever.
I tend to vote Democrat, but China's lack of respect for American Intellectual Property has to be curtailed. It hurts American interests when a competitor is allowed to steal their expensive IP and sell substantially similar products for significantly less because they don't have to pay for research.
Further, a "free" american market doesn't need to include foreign competitors playing by different rules.
I'd say that is demonstrably the case. What makes you think it isn't?
Nothing you wrote actually stands up to much scrutiny.
Huawei filed for more WIPO patents than any other company on the planet in 2018.
https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2018/article_0002.html
https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2019/article_0004.html
It is in the top five R&D investors worldwide and reportedly licences a huge amount of its patents to Apple.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/09/WS5cac0859a3104842260b5265.html
https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/apple-to-pay-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-in-patent-royalties-to-huawei-every-year
Here's a link;
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/how-huawei-became-a-u-s-government-target-quicktake
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/opinion/china-trump-trade.html#commentsContainer
"A U.S. businessman friend of mine who works in China remarked to me recently that Donald Trump is not the American president America deserves, but he sure is the American president China deserves."
Amen, brother.
It's mostly based on false pride rather than fact.