> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Doesn't Europe actually have a lot of Chinese equipment in their telecom infrastructure? Is this an effort just to try not to make that mistake again?
No, not a lot as the EU has two very competitive providers in Ericsson and Nokia
They're both very expensive and the carriers primarily care about cost and features. And huawei will take a dozen devs, give them a one way ticket and put them in a hotel room near a customer to grind our whatever feature needed to seal the deal.
I remember years ago talking to some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".
We live in new times anyways - most of the carriers have outsourced a lot of the tech stuff to the vendors anyways.
> some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".
Then he has no principle and cannot be trusted.
Yes. I worked for a Cambodian telco, when there was a range of Alcatel, Nokia, etc switching equipment across 10 carriers. Huawei swept the lot within 2 years, and Alcatel staff told me they were losing everywhere - they couldn't match the price or technology. This was before the US decided to sanction Huawei.
The entire problem is they aren't nearly as "very competitive" as would be politically convenient.
The UK certainly ripped out a lot of Huawei equipment. Which is why our cellular coverage is a bit shitty these days
I moved to UK in late 2013 and to be fair, from my observation the cellular coverage in the country has always been more than just a bit shitty.
Incidentally, the voice call quality in the UK is also really crappy. Operators compress/downsample the audio stream to the very edge of recognisability, because investing in sufficient infrastructure to support higher bandwidths is expensive.
As an American, I would much prefer spotty cellar coverage to a Salt Typhoon attack. You lot got off easy!
Europe will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
> They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
Being risk-averse unfortunately now means "avoid the USA".
With good cause
With US tech now in profit-squeezing mode rather than user-acquisition mode, the cost sensitivity might favor switching for things like SaaS.
Yep - just look at their oil/energy situation: they still buy it by the boatload from you know who, but just through 3rd parties.
But look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well.
Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
Yeah they are just insane whishfull thinkers.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar. That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe. Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country. That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
That's positive news, but I'm talking about oil - which is still needed for modern industrial economies (plastics, diesel, etc).
Would (gently) note that we’re commenting on an article re: American tech risk. :)
Not sure it’s really sunk in for my fellow Americans what’s going on, we’re not exactly used to consequences and it’s still considered, a best, impolite to treat a holistic evaluation of policies as something beyond debate.
US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
> US says that Europe is their number one enemy.
Pardon my French, but where do you get that nonsense from?
The latest US national security strategy, one would assume.
Without getting hung up on the exact phrase “number 1”. It’s very literally one of the biggest things in official US national security strategy right now and some leaks of the non-public version talk about explicit plans to try and destroy the EU. So semantics aside, the overall point stands on solid ground.
That whole thing is just incoherent. There's lots about forming a trading alliance against China, and then loads about destroying the EU. You can't have both of those at the same time.
Those fools think of Russia as ally against both.
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How was it a mistake? Europe got a lot of good telecom infrastructure for a low price. There's no evidence it was compromised.
It was actually the US that was pressuring Europe to get rid of Chinese telecom equipment, as part of the first Trump administration's broader strategy against China.