We need to talk about Huawei...or do we?

Oddly enough the US policy against Huawei is mostly beneficial to two very large European companies : Ericsson and Nokia.

There aren't really many US companies in the that sector anymore.

Lucent was the last very big US one but that was acquired by Alcatel and they were subsequently acquired by Nokia.

Motorola used to be big in mobile telecommunications technology but they faded away and Qualcomm pursued proprietary technology CDMA One / 2000 and EV-DO that's never been used in Europe as it's not GSM based.

So really if Huawei is spying you're looking at business from European telecoms going back to their traditional suppliers which are all European.

Samsung is also quite big in that area. 3's 4G network here for example is based on their gear.

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The biggest exposure to Huawei in Ireland is FTTC and FTTH. Eir uses Huawei DSLAMs for the fibre to cabinet services and both Eir and Siro use them for fibre to home.

The major alternative supplier there is Nokia, Alcatel is pretty big in that type of technology.

ED E wrote: »

Nokia may be Finnish but they've got a big US presence via Alcatel via Bell Labs. No question of them being "courteous" to three letter agencies so the US won't consider them filthy foreigners.



Still curious why AL lost out on the VDSL trials, though one can guess it might have been price.

Almost certainly price and the fact that BT had success with them as a supplier for FTTC deployments with a previous generation of their gear. The Huawei cabinets seemed to be a perfect fit for Eir's access network - small, unobtrusive cabinets that were designed to plug straight into the existing junction cabinets.

AL had been providing small MSANs to the trial that seemed to replace the PCP and included voice services. I'm not sure if they were also integrating into some replacement for the AL E10 PSTN exchanges.

I also got the impression that the trial services around Dundrum were looking for a combined solution that would have replaced the traditional telephone exchange equipment with cabinets. The same was true of early BT deployment.

However, the solution the ultimately opted for just abandoned the idea of replacing voice services with cabinet deployed equipment and concentrated entirely on VDSL and a future FTTH rollout. I would assume POTS just became an increasingly obsolete irrelevance as it can be done by VoIP and abandon dial tone services entirely and customers are abandoning landline services for voice anyway.

If PSTN dial tone services are retained, most customers won't be using them so, you could feasibly deploy some much smaller scale AL or Ericsson solution for the people who insist on having old school phone lines. In the meantime they'll likely just use the existing equipment for as long as it's useful life allows and route the traffic over VoIP behind the scenes.

During that trial period a lot of traditional telcos including BT and Eir finally realised they were actually no longer phone companies and their core business was now broadband.

Eircom was always fairly conservative about new suppliers. Their core voice network has been using mostly Ericsson for example since before 1957.

Huawei has established a good track record and they're coming in at good pricing. That's why they're getting projects and managing to prise old telecoms companies away from their historical suppliers.

If there's a big issue with Huawei, their problem is their customers are largely old, conservative, legacy telcos.

That's why I'm not convinced that they're up to anything. It would absolutely decimate their business if they were and I'm sure they know that.