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Businesses Communications United States

US Firms Get 90-Day Extension To Work With Huawei On Rural Networks (npr.org) 37

The Trump administration is giving American companies another three months to do business with the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, the Commerce Department said Monday. From a report: It is the third time the U.S. has extended a reprieve, which is meant to help ease disruption for Huawei customers. Many Internet and cellphone carriers in rural parts of the U.S. buy networking equipment from Huawei, and the temporary extension means they can keep their networks up to date. "The Temporary General License extension will allow carriers to continue to service customers in some of the most remote areas of the United States who would otherwise be left in the dark," said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement.
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US Firms Get 90-Day Extension To Work With Huawei On Rural Networks

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  • Political keyfabe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Monday November 18, 2019 @01:19PM (#59427106)
    I won't comment on whether the policy is good or bad, but if you're just going to keep granting endless extensions then your actions just start to come across as political keyfabe [wikipedia.org]. While that can certainly be applied to almost any politician or party, I think it fits Trump particularly well.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Or, you know, maybe you're just trying to give these companies sufficient time for a huge adjustment, and not be blamed for the loss of jobs and communications.

      • So what do you think are the chances we'll see a forth extension?

        If this were the first time, I think you'd have more a point, but either the time tables are unreasonable and no one really considered the ramifications of this action or it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Once you start dragging your feet on something, there's a lot less incentive to take future deadlines all that seriously.
  • by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Monday November 18, 2019 @01:23PM (#59427130)
    ... a threat to national security and indeed hold backdoors that send China all the data they want, there should be no ban on them. The tariff war has lead to some absurd decisions, that have no evidence to back them up.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cfulmer ( 3166 )

      There are two problem.

      First of all, Huawei has a history of backdoors: https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]

      And, second, Huawei's 5G solution uses frequencies that are adjacent to those reserved in the US for military use and would cause significant problems for the US military. That's not required by any 5G standards -- it's just what Huawei chose to do.

      We should not forget that China's government is not some innocuous player on the world scene. Look at Hong Kong. Look at their treatment of Muslim minoritie

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by fbobraga ( 1612783 )

        First of all, Huawei has a history of backdoors

        Are you sure about that? Smells like a FUD campaign to me... (I'm not an US citizen, nor Chinese :P)

      • We should not forget that US's government is not some innocuous player on the world scene. Look at Afghanistan, the US Border. Look at their treatment of Muslim minorities. Look at their history of cyber espionage

        If Huawei wants to bring me better than "1.5Mbps" (.3-.5Mbps actual) DSL more power to them. At least with the additional bandwidth I can reliably route everything through a VPN or two.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday November 18, 2019 @04:45PM (#59428028) Homepage Journal

        First of all, Huawei has a history of backdoors

        Not as bad as the Cisco ones though. The Huawei one was a plausible cock-up, Cisco has a long history of repeatedly putting hard coded backdoors for tech support in to its products quite deliberately and as a matter of policy.

        Huawei's 5G solution uses frequencies that are adjacent to those reserved in the US for military

        That's some new bullshit I hadn't heard before. 5G can use a variety of frequencies and the carrier sets the equipment to use the ones it has a licence for. Huawei doesn't control the frequencies, the carrier does.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Except Huawei DOESN'T have a history of backdoors. There's been already 2 decades where people have been using Huawei equipment, and no backdoors have been found. If it has, US intelligence has not even given such information to their 5 eyes partners. Let alone their other "allies" like Germany. If they did, it would be plastered ALL over the news, but it hasn't. Vodaphone after bloomberg and co came out with that article stated that it wasn't a backdoor, it was a run in a mill coding bug, the same tha
    • smells new WMD claim on Iraq :P
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Here's an alternate wording of the summary:

    The Trump administration is trying desperately to save face with American companies for another three months until their trade war escalates again in a completely-unforeseeable effect of pandering to isolationists...

    I'm all in favor of American industry and the American economy (especially since that's almost entirely the source of my lifestyle), but the isolationist policies here are absurd. Yes, it's terribly unfortunate that America had a huge recession, while China mostly survived unscathed. Rather than blame them for their success, we could actually just keep the successful recovery efforts going here in the US, enjoying the rapid economic growth the last decade brought u

    • Yes, it's terribly unfortunate that America had a huge recession, while China mostly survived unscathed.

      There's an easy explanation for that:

      China has a Great Wall.

      America has a Wall Street.

    • The rapid American growth is fueled by debt. A Trillion dollars a year in debt gets you a lot of growth, until you go broke.
  • As someone who relies on these "rural networks", I really don't care at all if equipment is supplied by Huawei. If they can just get me broadband speeds like most people here in the 21st century, I'll accept the risk (if there indeed is any).

    Just for crying out loud can we please get real broadband to rural areas in the US? Just because some elected officials want to operate like a third world country doesn't mean we have to have third world communications infrastructure.

    • Also in the hills (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Monday November 18, 2019 @01:35PM (#59427214) Journal

      I disagree strongly. If Huawei is possibly a threat to the integrity of our networks (they are) they should be banned and the ban should stick.

      What we should not do is let the Bell / Cable / etc operators off the hook for their commitments. If they have to pay more of domestically sourced hardware or do a little extra engineering around the hardware they can actually get that is THEIR problem.

    • i'm in the same boat -- but don't worry, help is apparently on the way via Starlink. :)

    • The American internet companies were paid to extend the network. You need to claw back that money with interest where they didn't build out the network.
  • by hackingbear ( 988354 ) on Monday November 18, 2019 @01:29PM (#59427172)

    - The US called Huawei a great imminent national security threat, you know, like those pesky Iraq WMDs.
    - The US keeps extending permit for Huawei to do "harms" within the USA again, again and again.
    - The US couldn't show any evidences of Huawei's harm, you know, like it couldn't find any WMDs in Iraq except the few left-over that the US itself sold to Saddam decades earlier.

    ==> The US government has been a pathological liar.

  • I'd like to pick the network gear that doesn't spy on me. It would seem that maybe my only real choice is choosing which spies have access by default.
  • RED DANGER!!!111!!!
  • Does it mean they're getting more time to replace Huawei equipment, or to install more?
  • We all pay extra fees on our phones, broadband, tv, etc., to subsidize rural connectivity. If I'm going to have to pay more taxes, at the very least I want to make sure my tax dollars aren't being handed to China. I'm willing to subsidize other Americans, I am not willing to subsidize China.

    Our governments, at every level, should only ever buy American. We will get more bang for our buck that way, as our tax dollars will stay in the US, boosting the economy, paying more workers and generating more tax

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