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Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

(www.bbc.com)
293 points doener | 3 comments | 14 Jul 20 12:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.395s | source
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jaekash ◴[14 Jul 20 13:26 UTC] No.23831635[source]▶
And we already know China has been backdooring other equipment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

So yes, this is a small victory in a massive war.

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londons_explore ◴[14 Jul 20 13:36 UTC] No.23831765[source]▶
The cost of that victory, according to the BBC, is a 1 year delay in the rollout of 5G tech.

That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.

All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?

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1. mpfundstein ◴[14 Jul 20 14:17 UTC] No.23832226[source]▶
i run my whole office on 4g (amsterdam, europe). it works super nicely. in fact often better than my wifi at home...

4g is everywhere in NL. it just works great whereever you are. so i really wonder where the immediate need for 5g is.

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2. fock ◴[14 Jul 20 18:27 UTC] No.23835767[source]▶
upselling it to everyone not satisfied with shitty wifi from their shittiest telco-modem/router/AP-abomination. And squeezing the lemon in the process.
3. isbjorn16 ◴[14 Jul 20 19:08 UTC] No.23836306[source]▶
My understanding is that 4g requires a lot more effort to provision more or less capacity as need arises. I've been to a few brownbags on the topic and I didn't fully understand it (it's not my area of expertise by many hops), but the big selling point the engineers were explaining to us was that they can effectively put telco equipment in cloud-like datacenters and spool up or spin down capacity much simpler than they can now. And then something about the tower-edge being far more advanced and able to be spooled up or down as need requires.

I live on an island near a metro with a lot of traffic when the ferry from the metro arrives, then it disappears. Every single ferry that comes in knocks out 4g responsiveness (or takes it down entirely) while the ferry disembarks until everyone moves away from that area.

So, for me, 5g has a projected material benefit (presuming my understanding of their brownbags were sufficient). I'd love to hear any actual cellular network engineers fully explain it because between words I didn't understand and trying to balance a salad and eat it without a table, I'm sure I misunderstood _something_.