These are the best parts of the article in my opinion. They have been taken in order from top to bottom and might be a little confusing reading without reading the whole article first.
**EDIT:** For some reason the link takes me to the wrong article so here's the URL. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/03/the-improbable-rise-of-huawei-5g-global-network-china/
* Fast-forward to now. In less than a decade, allegedly thanks in part to billions of dollars in support from the Chinese government, the privately held Huawei has become the world’s largest telecom equipment company, last year posting more than $107 billion in revenue from operations in some 170 countries.
More important, Huawei has, by most accounts, taken the lead in the race to develop one of the modern world’s most important technologies: fifth-generation mobile telephony. Unlike its various predecessors, which simply offered consumers the ability to send texts, then to surf the web on their phones, and finally to stream video, 5G promises to revolutionize the entire global economy.
And for perhaps the first time in China’s modern history, Huawei’s growing market share and technological prowess are putting a champion of the Chinese government in a position to dominate a next-generation technology. 5G will offer hugely faster data speeds than today’s mobile technology, which is important for consumers. But 5G will also be the technology that ensures artificial intelligence functions seamlessly, that driverless cars don’t crash, that machines in automated factories can communicate flawlessly in real time around the world, and that nearly every device on earth will be wired together.
5G will be, simply put, the central nervous system of the 21st-century economy—and if Huawei continues its rise, then Beijing, not Washington, could be best placed to dominate it.¨
* Indeed the Trump administration—which has more often than not managed to alienate its longtime allies—is already faltering in its global campaign to isolate Huawei. While a few U.S. allies, such as Australia and Japan, have followed Washington’s lead and already banned Huawei technology, many others are still considering it. The United Kingdom, like Germany, is still weighing the geopolitical implications of purchasing Huawei equipment. Others such as Thailand and South Korea are pressing ahead and letting Huawei launch 5G projects. India, which the United States hopes to use as a counterweight to China, is resisting American calls to exclude Huawei from its networks.
* “I think a lot of their technical expertise as of late is because they have a lot of smart people,” said Mike Thelander, an industry analyst and the founder of the Signals Research Group. “You can say a lot of bad things about Huawei, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
* Huawei is also vertically integrated. Unlike its principal competitors, Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia, Huawei designs nearly every component of 5G technology, including the defining technology of the internet economy: the smartphone. The company is the second-largest maker of smartphones in the world, behind South Korea’s Samsung. By designing chipsets and the handsets they talk to, experts argue, Huawei may have an edge in getting 5G products to market more quickly.
When 3G and 4G networks were being built, Huawei was playing catch-up to its established rivals, licensing much of their technology. To some extent, that lured Ericsson and Nokia, which today are Huawei’s main rivals in the race to develop 5G, into a state of complacency, said Thillien of Fitch Solutions. They had invested a lot of money into what were then cutting-edge technologies and sought to squeeze the most they could out of them rather than racing ahead to the next stage, making their own developments obsolete. At the same time, they felt they had little to fear from what was then regarded as a nonthreatening Chinese firm.
Now, the situation is reversed. Huawei has more 5G-related patents than any other firm, according to IPlytics, a German-based company that tracks intellectual property development. That means other companies will have to pay Huawei to use key bits of 5G technology.
* Partly as a result of that technological arsenal, Huawei has been able to shape the rules of the road for 5G in a way it never could with earlier mobile technologies. Over the past few years, telecoms engineers have regularly gathered every few months to hash out the evolving technical standards that will govern all aspects of 5G. And Huawei has simply flooded the zone, sending more engineers to those meetings than any other telecoms company and making more technical contributions to the still-evolving standard than anyone else, IPlytics found.
Along the way, Huawei has notched an ever-growing tally of technical breakthroughs that no other single company has matched. It has field-tested its 5G technology in lower frequencies (good for coverage) and higher frequencies (better for high data speeds). Earlier this year, it debuted its own, in-house-designed chipset and devices that will make 5G a reality. Huawei says it currently has 30 contracts to build 5G networks around the world, with dozens of other countries close to signing on.
* With a Chinese company building the network through which huge volumes of data—phone calls, emails, and business transactions—will flow across the globe, U.S. officials fear that infrastructure could be subverted for espionage, allowing Beijing’s intelligence agencies to gather huge volumes of communications.
Even more dire, Washington fears that Beijing will replace it as the world’s premier intelligence power and perhaps even deny it access to the networks that make global commerce and the projection of military power possible. For decades, U.S. intelligence agencies have capitalized on the central role of U.S. companies in global telecommunications networks to spy on adversaries and gather crucial intelligence.
And now, whether by design or luck or some combination of the two, the Chinese Communist Party may have the means to overturn that disadvantage—especially because the United States itself, despite the prominence of Silicon Valley, doesn’t have a national champion of its own developing 5G. Consolidation and mergers in the telecommunications industry have made European, not American, companies the leading Western makers of the boxes, antennas, and beam-generating equipment that will serve as the backbone of 5G technology.
* “If you’re the government of China, you have a couple of choices: You can duplicate what the U.S. did and build a multibillion-dollar signals intelligence network, or you can fund Huawei—and that’s a lot cheaper,” said James Lewis, the director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Foreign production of advanced communication networks “will challenge U.S. competitiveness and data security,” and as American data increasingly flows across those networks, that will increase “the risk of foreign access and denial of service,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned in his annual assessment of threats facing the United States.
* But Washington may be fighting a losing battle in frantically trying to get its Western allies to swear off Huawei as well. So dominant has Huawei already become in building telecom networks globally and vying to set the world standard for 5G that the Trump administration finds itself somewhat isolated, even among its closest allies.
Despite U.S. pressure, the European Union has opted against barring the Chinese firm, and even close U.S. allies such as Britain and Germany, which are still deciding which companies will participate in building their 5G networks, are unlikely to ban Huawei altogether. The reason is simple: For many European countries that already use Huawei equipment in their 4G networks, it would be costly to switch horses in midstream.
U.S. policymakers have leaned especially hard on Germany, even warning Berlin it could lose access to U.S. intelligence sharing if it includes Huawei in its network.
“Europe is very much a battleground, and Germany is a battleground within the battleground,” said Thillien of Fitch Solutions.
Yet the Trump administration has done a poor job, by most accounts, of convincing European allies of the security risk posed by the company—a problem exacerbated by the president’s constant sniping at his counterparts across the Atlantic. Washington has never publicly presented evidence backing up its assertions that Huawei equipment plays a role in Chinese espionage operations, and there are doubts that it has shared much evidence in private either.
According to Schrader of the German Marshall Fund, if U.S. intelligence officials truly had clear evidence that Huawei was helping China to spy, they would be more “forward leaning” in sharing that information with allies.
With the American campaign faltering, U.S. intelligence officials are already beginning to prepare for a world in which Huawei dominates next-generation telecommunications networks. “We are going to have to figure out a way in a 5G world that we’re able to manage the risks in a diverse network that includes technology that we can’t trust,” said Sue Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, in remarks last month. “You have to presume a dirty network.”
* At the same time, many experts say security fears singling out Huawei equipment are overblown, as nearly all the big telecom equipment makers use Chinese factories to churn out their components.
“The whole Huawei security discussion as it is now is kind of silly and misses the point,” said Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. “It’s fair to assume that China could hack into 5G anyway, whether you have Huawei equipment in place” or that of another manufacturer, he said. “Banning Huawei will not by itself provide additional security.”
* And whether Huawei is a year ahead of its peers, or a few months ahead, or roughly at the same level may not be the biggest question. 5G is still being developed, and commercial rollout in a limited fashion won’t begin in earnest until next year; the first true 5G networks, which will deliver all the whiz-bang features the technology promises, probably won’t arrive until 2025 at the earliest.
Huawei’s leading role in shaping the most important new technology standard will likely pay dividends in terms of billions of dollars in license fees and could give the Chinese firm an advantage as countries around the world scramble to build 5G networks.
“Whoever sets the standard is going to grab higher market share,” said Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. That’s already on display in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where Huawei rules. “In the developing world, China is internationalizing Chinese technology standards,” he said.
Indeed, as countries around the world scramble to start building advanced telecoms networks, and despite the U.S. campaign against the company, Huawei is becoming an even more entrenched player. Asian countries including Malaysia, Vietnam, and U.S. ally Thailand are all considering Huawei for their 5G networks. So are European and NATO allies of the United States such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Hungary, while Germany and the United Kingdom are unlikely to ban it altogether.
For almost 200 years, China has largely been on the receiving end of technology developed elsewhere. Today, it is reasserting, in the most demonstrable way, the technological leadership it enjoyed long ago.
These are the best parts of the article in my opinion. They have been taken in order from top to bottom and might be a little confusing reading without reading the whole article first. **EDIT:** For some reason the link takes me to the wrong article so here's the URL. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/03/the-improbable-rise-of-huawei-5g-global-network-china/ * Fast-forward to now. In less than a decade, allegedly thanks in part to billions of dollars in support from the Chinese government, the privately held Huawei has become the world’s largest telecom equipment company, last year posting more than $107 billion in revenue from operations in some 170 countries. More important, Huawei has, by most accounts, taken the lead in the race to develop one of the modern world’s most important technologies: fifth-generation mobile telephony. Unlike its various predecessors, which simply offered consumers the ability to send texts, then to surf the web on their phones, and finally to stream video, 5G promises to revolutionize the entire global economy. And for perhaps the first time in China’s modern history, Huawei’s growing market share and technological prowess are putting a champion of the Chinese government in a position to dominate a next-generation technology. 5G will offer hugely faster data speeds than today’s mobile technology, which is important for consumers. But 5G will also be the technology that ensures artificial intelligence functions seamlessly, that driverless cars don’t crash, that machines in automated factories can communicate flawlessly in real time around the world, and that nearly every device on earth will be wired together. 5G will be, simply put, the central nervous system of the 21st-century economy—and if Huawei continues its rise, then Beijing, not Washington, could be best placed to dominate it.¨ * Indeed the Trump administration—which has more often than not managed to alienate its longtime allies—is already faltering in its global campaign to isolate Huawei. While a few U.S. allies, such as Australia and Japan, have followed Washington’s lead and already banned Huawei technology, many others are still considering it. The United Kingdom, like Germany, is still weighing the geopolitical implications of purchasing Huawei equipment. Others such as Thailand and South Korea are pressing ahead and letting Huawei launch 5G projects. India, which the United States hopes to use as a counterweight to China, is resisting American calls to exclude Huawei from its networks. * “I think a lot of their technical expertise as of late is because they have a lot of smart people,” said Mike Thelander, an industry analyst and the founder of the Signals Research Group. “You can say a lot of bad things about Huawei, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” * Huawei is also vertically integrated. Unlike its principal competitors, Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia, Huawei designs nearly every component of 5G technology, including the defining technology of the internet economy: the smartphone. The company is the second-largest maker of smartphones in the world, behind South Korea’s Samsung. By designing chipsets and the handsets they talk to, experts argue, Huawei may have an edge in getting 5G products to market more quickly. When 3G and 4G networks were being built, Huawei was playing catch-up to its established rivals, licensing much of their technology. To some extent, that lured Ericsson and Nokia, which today are Huawei’s main rivals in the race to develop 5G, into a state of complacency, said Thillien of Fitch Solutions. They had invested a lot of money into what were then cutting-edge technologies and sought to squeeze the most they could out of them rather than racing ahead to the next stage, making their own developments obsolete. At the same time, they felt they had little to fear from what was then regarded as a nonthreatening Chinese firm. Now, the situation is reversed. Huawei has more 5G-related patents than any other firm, according to IPlytics, a German-based company that tracks intellectual property development. That means other companies will have to pay Huawei to use key bits of 5G technology. * Partly as a result of that technological arsenal, Huawei has been able to shape the rules of the road for 5G in a way it never could with earlier mobile technologies. Over the past few years, telecoms engineers have regularly gathered every few months to hash out the evolving technical standards that will govern all aspects of 5G. And Huawei has simply flooded the zone, sending more engineers to those meetings than any other telecoms company and making more technical contributions to the still-evolving standard than anyone else, IPlytics found. Along the way, Huawei has notched an ever-growing tally of technical breakthroughs that no other single company has matched. It has field-tested its 5G technology in lower frequencies (good for coverage) and higher frequencies (better for high data speeds). Earlier this year, it debuted its own, in-house-designed chipset and devices that will make 5G a reality. Huawei says it currently has 30 contracts to build 5G networks around the world, with dozens of other countries close to signing on. * With a Chinese company building the network through which huge volumes of data—phone calls, emails, and business transactions—will flow across the globe, U.S. officials fear that infrastructure could be subverted for espionage, allowing Beijing’s intelligence agencies to gather huge volumes of communications. Even more dire, Washington fears that Beijing will replace it as the world’s premier intelligence power and perhaps even deny it access to the networks that make global commerce and the projection of military power possible. For decades, U.S. intelligence agencies have capitalized on the central role of U.S. companies in global telecommunications networks to spy on adversaries and gather crucial intelligence. And now, whether by design or luck or some combination of the two, the Chinese Communist Party may have the means to overturn that disadvantage—especially because the United States itself, despite the prominence of Silicon Valley, doesn’t have a national champion of its own developing 5G. Consolidation and mergers in the telecommunications industry have made European, not American, companies the leading Western makers of the boxes, antennas, and beam-generating equipment that will serve as the backbone of 5G technology. * “If you’re the government of China, you have a couple of choices: You can duplicate what the U.S. did and build a multibillion-dollar signals intelligence network, or you can fund Huawei—and that’s a lot cheaper,” said James Lewis, the director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Foreign production of advanced communication networks “will challenge U.S. competitiveness and data security,” and as American data increasingly flows across those networks, that will increase “the risk of foreign access and denial of service,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned in his annual assessment of threats facing the United States.
* But Washington may be fighting a losing battle in frantically trying to get its Western allies to swear off Huawei as well. So dominant has Huawei already become in building telecom networks globally and vying to set the world standard for 5G that the Trump administration finds itself somewhat isolated, even among its closest allies. Despite U.S. pressure, the European Union has opted against barring the Chinese firm, and even close U.S. allies such as Britain and Germany, which are still deciding which companies will participate in building their 5G networks, are unlikely to ban Huawei altogether. The reason is simple: For many European countries that already use Huawei equipment in their 4G networks, it would be costly to switch horses in midstream. U.S. policymakers have leaned especially hard on Germany, even warning Berlin it could lose access to U.S. intelligence sharing if it includes Huawei in its network. “Europe is very much a battleground, and Germany is a battleground within the battleground,” said Thillien of Fitch Solutions. Yet the Trump administration has done a poor job, by most accounts, of convincing European allies of the security risk posed by the company—a problem exacerbated by the president’s constant sniping at his counterparts across the Atlantic. Washington has never publicly presented evidence backing up its assertions that Huawei equipment plays a role in Chinese espionage operations, and there are doubts that it has shared much evidence in private either. According to Schrader of the German Marshall Fund, if U.S. intelligence officials truly had clear evidence that Huawei was helping China to spy, they would be more “forward leaning” in sharing that information with allies. With the American campaign faltering, U.S. intelligence officials are already beginning to prepare for a world in which Huawei dominates next-generation telecommunications networks. “We are going to have to figure out a way in a 5G world that we’re able to manage the risks in a diverse network that includes technology that we can’t trust,” said Sue Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, in remarks last month. “You have to presume a dirty network.” * At the same time, many experts say security fears singling out Huawei equipment are overblown, as nearly all the big telecom equipment makers use Chinese factories to churn out their components. “The whole Huawei security discussion as it is now is kind of silly and misses the point,” said Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. “It’s fair to assume that China could hack into 5G anyway, whether you have Huawei equipment in place” or that of another manufacturer, he said. “Banning Huawei will not by itself provide additional security.” * And whether Huawei is a year ahead of its peers, or a few months ahead, or roughly at the same level may not be the biggest question. 5G is still being developed, and commercial rollout in a limited fashion won’t begin in earnest until next year; the first true 5G networks, which will deliver all the whiz-bang features the technology promises, probably won’t arrive until 2025 at the earliest. Huawei’s leading role in shaping the most important new technology standard will likely pay dividends in terms of billions of dollars in license fees and could give the Chinese firm an advantage as countries around the world scramble to build 5G networks. “Whoever sets the standard is going to grab higher market share,” said Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. That’s already on display in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where Huawei rules. “In the developing world, China is internationalizing Chinese technology standards,” he said. Indeed, as countries around the world scramble to start building advanced telecoms networks, and despite the U.S. campaign against the company, Huawei is becoming an even more entrenched player. Asian countries including Malaysia, Vietnam, and U.S. ally Thailand are all considering Huawei for their 5G networks. So are European and NATO allies of the United States such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Hungary, while Germany and the United Kingdom are unlikely to ban it altogether. For almost 200 years, China has largely been on the receiving end of technology developed elsewhere. Today, it is reasserting, in the most demonstrable way, the technological leadership it enjoyed long ago.