Experts in the US and other countries have long suspected that Huawei’s products spy for China, but it seems inextricable from India’s telecom sector.
But why we Indians are still buying it!
Since August 2018, seven countries have either banned Huawei (
US,
Australia,
New Zealand, and
Japan), are mulling a ban extension (
Taiwan), or have seen their leading telecom companies discontinue or restrict the use of Huawei infrastructure (
UK and
France). In addition, the US is
calling Germany and Italy to join the fray against the Chinese firm.
But why Indian is continuing to buy it from China 🇨🇳
“The Chinese are master negotiators,” Wakhlu said. “When a company offers equipment at the cheapest possible price and gives you about 15 years to pay off the bills, it’s hard to say no, and by the time you realise it, you’re deep in debt and it’s too late to back out of the ties.”
Prasad, an alumnus of Carnegie Melon and IIT-Kanpur, described one of the most suspicious things noted in Huawei equipment, though he said it wasn’t conclusive proof of a ‘backdoor
There is a call set-up network, by which your phone queries my phone if I am ready to receive a call. A small amount of call set up data travels, and it is not encrypted. However, on some Huawei networks, it was occasionally seen that huge amounts of encrypted data – several hundred megabytes – were travelling. But it could not be determined where this encrypted data was going to, or what the [data] packets contained,” he said in an email to ThePrint.
“Typically, the time taken for the call set up is a few hundredths of a second. But in some Huawei equipment, it was occasionally seen that it took about a second to set up calls, about twenty to fifty times longer than what it ought to take.
“This is very suspicious behaviour, but it is not conclusive proof of espionage by Huawei. They might just be collecting information about the performance of their networks in operation, and sending this data back to China for the purpose of improving their equipment.”
