By icing out China telecom giant Huawei, Trump relegates U.S. to a 5G also-ran
By
Dana Kennedy
“Should I get a Huawei
phone?”
That’s what friends in
New York City, where ads heralding 5G are popping up all over, have asked me
more than once. Apple, biding its time, has yet to
release an iPhone with 5G.
If the customers are
tech heads with money to burn for a new toy, they could say yes. Better to say
no.
But here’s the real
answer: It’s not about the phone.
It’s more about how a
social media and smartphone-obsessed America may be dropping the ball when it
comes to controlling the nascent 5G revolution. China’s Huawei wants
to dominate 5G on a global scale.
It doesn’t help that
we have a president more interested in making deals than in protecting U.S.
security or encouraging innovation. Besides, Trump doesn’t understand the basics of 5G.
As part of his ongoing
trade war with China, Trump has made Huawei into the Voldemort of telecoms.
The average person knows about Huawei because, as part of his ongoing trade war with China, Trump has made it into the Voldemort of telecoms. He’s blacklisting the company ostensibly because it could spy on us. And he has lobbied U.S. allies not to use Huawei equipment when building next-generation 5G wireless networks.
Huawei’s also a threat
to what Trump called a “race we must win” and a “race we will win” in an awkward April
speech. During the U.S. rollout of 5G, Trump sounded as if he were
reading an old script from “The Jetsons.”
U.S. Way Behind on 5G
America’s actual
chances of winning that race? Not likely said FCC commissioner Jessica
Rosenworcel. Quoting a recent U.S military report on 5G, she said, “The
country that owns 5G will own innovations and set the standards for the rest of
the world and that country is currently not likely to be the United States.”
Huawei, established in
1987 when China imported telecommunication technology, is considered a threat
to national security because of close ties to the Chinese government. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Huawei’s
increasing global dominance was subsidized by $75 billion in state support.
Huawei has a hot new
flagship phone with 5G capability. Yes, this after starting to make handsets
just five years ago.
But where the massive
Chinese company really beats us, for now, involves the key infrastructure like
routers, servers and cell phone towers that will power the Internet of
Things and smart factories. 5G has been hyped as the wireless magic that
will enable everything from driverless cars to remote surgery.
World’s Largest
Equipment Maker
Huawei is the largest
manufacturer of telecommunications equipment in the world
and is second only to Samsung in owning the most 5G
essential patents. The United States has strong companies like Cisco
and Qualcomm which arguably owns some of the best quality 5G patents. But we are behind when it comes to the most critical components of 5G
technology.
We lack suppliers for
the main switching networks for 5G, so European companies like Nokia and
Ericsson will have to build them. “The U.S. has a big hole when it comes to
American-made infrastructure for 5G and it puts us at a real
disadvantage,” Bob O’Donnell,
chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, told DCReport.
“But I don’t think
Trump even understands it. Remember when he went to that Apple factory in Texas
this fall and said Apple is going to make the 5G network happen. Hello dude!
Apple makes phones that connect to the network. They’ve got nothing to do with
making the network!”
Google Shut Out
You can still shell
out for the cool new Huawei Mate 30 Pro. One reviewer called it “the incredible phone you won’t buy.” But because the Trump
administration has forced U.S. companies like Google to cut off Huawei, it
won’t have the pre-installed Google apps like YouTube and Chrome.
Huawei’s taken a big
hit here and around the world as a result of the sanctions. It issued a lengthy rebuttal to claims that it’s both dangerous
spyware and cheap.
The company, however,
is resilient. Its top executive in India, Charles Peng, recently announced a rollout next year of replacements
for Google’s app suite (GMS) with its own HMS, or Huawei Media Services. On
Dec. 30, the Indian government allowed Huawei to participate in trials for 5G
networks, Reuters reported.
5G will show up
as simply faster wireless networks for the next two years.
But watching foreign powers vault past America is a bitter pill for a country
that pretty much invented modern telecommunications.
Some perspective:
Samuel Morse’s first telegraph line was installed in 1844; the first
transcontinental telegraph line, 1861. China didn’t get a telegraph line until
1877. The line was only six miles long.
Rapid Growth in China
In contrast, China had
only 7,000 phone subscribers in 1910. All were in Beijing and owned only by the
very rich who got the technology from the West, according to Eric Harwit,
a professor at the University of Hawaii and author of “China’s Telecommunications Revolution.”
When Harwit was an
exchange student in Beijing in 1982, “No one had a phone in their house,” he
said. Harwit had to go to the Ministry of Communications when he wanted to call
his parents back here.
Alexander Graham Bell
made the first transcontinental phone call in 1915 from the
storied American Telephone & Telegraph building in Manhattan, now home to
Nobu restaurant.
Bell could never have
imagined that more than a century later, the Chinese would—within two
decades—leapfrog past landlines to claim the fastest deployment of
telecommunications technology in the world.
“If you’d told me even
in 1982 that China would have more mobile phone subscribers and Internet users
that any other country it would just not compute,” Harwit said. “They were
lagging behind for so long. Now it’s the opposite. I’m just not sure banning them
is the way for the U.S. to go. We’re a free market. Instead we should start
focusing on what we can bring to 5G.”
The question for the
moment, then, is not whether to get a 5G phone—but rather, can the U.S. get 5G?