Officials to lobby against Chinese company at world’s biggest telecoms trade show
in London and
in Washington 9 hours ago
Mobile World Congress, which will draw 100,000 people from across the telecoms industry to Barcelona as it opens on Sunday, is the biggest event in the annual calendar for the Chinese company Huawei.
Huawei has booked out a huge stand at the show, and will unveil its new generation of mobile phones. Ren Zhengfei, its founder, and rotating chairmen Ken Hu and Guo Ping will all attend.
But this year it is facing what some industry executives have dubbed “the Battle of Barcelona”. Lined up against the Chinese company will be several delegations of US government officials, seeking to convince industry groups and telecoms operators to drop Huawei from the next generation of mobile internet infrastructure because of security concerns.
As well as officials from the Federal Communications Commission, there will be representatives from the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and a “big delegation” from the Department of State, which is co-ordinating the lobbying push, according to several people involved in the arrangements. One senior telecoms executive said MWC is turning into a “referendum on Huawei”.
A US official said: “There is a huge American delegation going this time. The difficulty they will have is persuading the Europeans to take action on the basis of intelligence we might not be able to share.”
In the past week, anticipating further action from Washington, Huawei has markedly stepped up its rhetoric and struck a more aggressive tone, with Mr Ren giving a series of television interviews and saying that the US will not be able to crush Huawei.
Donald Trump, US president, has been giving mixed signals. On Friday, he said he did not want to block foreign 5G equipment, suggesting he has rejected the advice of those advocating a ban to stop US telecoms companies from buying Huawei goods at all.
Mr Trump added that he could include Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE in any future trade deal, despite the efforts of some in his administration to keep the Huawei issue separate from US-China trade talks.
“If that means that he [Trump] got what he wants and Huawei is allowed to live its life then who knows what this army of people [US government officials] will be saying,” remarked one telecoms executive.
Huawei hopes to move the dispute over its involvement in European telecoms networks back on to more technical ground. From the basement of the Savoy hotel in London in the days running up to MWC it held a four-way 5G call with executives from Vodafone, EE and Three.
The trick was described by one person in the meeting as akin to a “dog walking on two legs” but it also showed that Huawei equipment is already being used in Britain’s nascent 5G mobile networks.
Huawei also revealed a host of advanced telecoms communications equipment for 5G deployment including antennas a third of the size of 4G equivalents, smaller mobile phone masts that cost a third less to install and products under the banner of “pervasive intelligence” that included its own chipsets used to speed up switching within a data centre and more advanced CCTV cameras.
The company boasted of its 87,805 patents, 80,000 research engineers and €11.1bn spend on research and development in 2018, more than US technology giants Intel and Apple, making it the fifth-largest investor in research in the world.
But the message was really aimed at Europe’s telecoms companies as it detailed the power consumption, construction and deployment savings of each piece of equipment it unveiled.
John Delaney, an analyst with IDC, said that the combined effect of Huawei’s 5G announcements was to show how European telecoms networks, already struggling with high costs and low margins, could lower the total cost of ownership of running their network by deploying their equipment for 5G. “Huawei is working hard to build an extremely persuasive case not to exclude it,” he added. The Chinese company argues that using its equipment will significantly lower the cost of running networks.
Ahead of MWC, Huawei’s case was finding favour with several telecoms operators, who are fearful that a ban on the Chinese company’s equipment would not only slow down the launch of 5G but cause major disruption as existing Huawei kit, designed to work with 5G networks, has to be replaced on masts and rooftops in cities.
One chief technology officer at a major network estimated that the equipment on between 200,000 and 250,000 masts across Europe would need to be overhauled should a continent-wide ban be enforced. “For Europe, this would be a really grim choice,” he said.
