UK moves to drop Huawei as 5G vendor
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The UK is moving to drop Huawei as a vendor for the country’s 5G cellphone network in a major blow to Communist China over poor coronavirus transparency.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, now recovering from COVID-19, gave the Chinese company a role in 5G infrastructure this year, squashing opposition last month by 24 votes in the 650-seat House of Commons.
But now, concern about the Chinese Communist Party’s inaccurate reporting on the coronavirus has lawmakers crafting plans for a retreat.
“We need to devise a proper, realistic exit strategy from relying on Huawei,” Conservative Member of Parliament Damian Green told Bloomberg News. “Our telecom providers … need to know the government is determined to drive down Huawei’s involvement to zero percent over a realistic timescale.”
AG Barr said, in February
5G technology lies at the center of the technological and industrial world that is taking shape. In essence, communications networks are not just for communications anymore. They are evolving into the central nervous system of the next generation of internet, called the "Industrial Internet," and the next generation of industrial systems that will depend on that infrastructure.
Much of the discussion on the dangers of allowing China to establish dominance in 5G has been focused on the immediate security concern of using communications networks that China can monitor and surveil. That is, in fact, a monumental danger. For that reason alone, we should mobilize to surmount China’s drive to dominate 5G. But the stakes are far higher than this.From a national security standpoint, if the Industrial Internet becomes dependent on Chinese technology, China would have the ability to shut countries off from technology and equipment upon which their consumers and industry depend. The power the United States has today to use economic sanctions would pale by comparison to the unprecedented economic leverage we would be surrendering into the hands of China.
...Some Americans think that all we are talking about here is analogous to the shift from 3G to 4G in our wireless networks.
The jump to 5G is a quantum leap beyond this. We are now talking about multi-Gigabits per second peak rates for both download and upload.
Devices of all kinds – some “smart,” some sensors collecting and transmitting data, and some actuators carrying out remote commands – can be dispersed and embedded in business and industrial equipment across a wide array of businesses, such as transportation, energy, finance, healthcare, agriculture, heavy construction, and so forth. 5G provides the command-and-control function for managing industrial processes.
As the world of 5G unfolds, we will be seeing not just smart homes, but smart farms, smart factories, smart heavy construction, smart transportation systems, and so forth. And a host of new emerging technologies, in addition to AI, will become interwoven with and dependent upon 5G and the Industrial Internet, including for example: robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
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With or without COVID-19, it’s simply not a good idea to rely on mainland-Chinese equipment in the telecommunications infrastructure. It’s too hard to trust the mainland-Chinese equipment vendors not to simply do whatever the mainland-Chinese government tells them to.
