The story of huawei smartphone

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It started in 1987, when Ren Zhengfei, a retired deputy director of the People’s Liberation Army in China, founded the company. Initially, it focused on developing phone switches while spending vigorously on R&D as well. It went on to develop networking technologies and soon moved to smartphones and consumer products. In 2005, it had a 5% share in the global smartphone market! Fast forward to last year (before the ban); it holds the second position in the market.

Not only that, Huawei is the leading company in 5G technology right now. It has contracts with many countries for the development of 5G infrastructure, including Nepal. Huawei’s 5G equipment is considered cheaper and more advanced than others, like Qualcomm. But herein lies the accusation – that Huawei’s 5G firmware has a “backdoor.” This backdoor can be used to acquire any information that passes through. And so, poses grave security issues.

Back in 2003, Huawei was accused of stealing the intellectual property of US-based organizations like Cisco – the network hardware maker. In 2014, it was accused of technology theft from Tappy – a phone testing robot from T-Mobile, which was settled in a civil lawsuit. In between, there has been a lot of such.

We won’t go into all the accusations in detail. The point is, Huawei has been accused of such things, time and again. But we haven’t heard of any grave consequences of such actions, and so, we cannot say what Huawei’s up to. The accusations go from technology theft to fraud, stealing military secrets from the US, and sabotaging US infrastructure.

Huawei faces a growing backlash from Western countries led by the US over the possible risks posed by its products in the next-gen 5G networks. The US leads the campaign against Huawei, both in terms of making the case about security threats it poses and legal issues alleging the firm of intellectual property theft and fraud.

And due to this, many countries have restricted the use of Huawei’s 5G equipment in their countries. Japan, France, and the Czech Republic are already on board with this while Germany is reviewing their policies. Australia already banned Huawei’s components last year and ZTE’s too. However, the UK is still positive about Huawei. The UK states that they will continue using Huawei’s equipment, but in a controlled way so that even if there’s a threat, they can monitor it themselves.

Interestingly, the US, UK, and Australia are the three members of an Intelligence Sharing Pact called the Five Eyes Alliance. And while New Zealand, one of the other members, also banned Huawei, Canada is still on the fence. And with the UK supporting Huawei, New Zealand and Canada might even reconsider.

In addition, Huawei is trying to make amends. It is willing to sign no-spy agreements with governments as concerns over the security of its products used in the mobile network continue to grow. Of course, it’s not doing a good job of convincing them, as we can see. Huawei is already on the US’s Entity List, which is also considered the “Death Penalty.” Companies in this list cannot do business with any US companies or entities. ZTE was on this list, too, revoked after ZTE agreed to pay a $1 billion fine and close surveillance to the company.


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