Whoops: Congress Failed To Actually Fund Efforts To “Rip And Replace” Chinese Telecom Gear From U.S. Networks
from the sorry-we're-not-competent-enough-to-do-this dept
You might recall that the FCC under both Trump and Biden has made a big deal about forcing U.S. telecoms to rip out Huawei gear from their networks, under the allegation that the gear is used to spy on Americans (you’re to ignore, of course, that the United States spies on everyone, constantly, and has broadly supported backdooring all manner of sensitive telecom products globally).
The efforts aren’t going so hot. U.S. ISPs that began yanking cheaper Chinese gear out of the networks say they’re only getting about forty percent of the money they need from the government to actually complete the job, (including destroying the gear so it’s not re-used):
Congress last year allocated about $1.9 billion for its Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, widely known in the telecom industry as the “rip and replace” program because participants are charged with ripping out Huawei and ZTE equipment and replacing it with “trusted” equipment from companies such as Ericsson, Nokia and Mavenir. However, dozens of mostly smaller US network operators participating in the effort believe that far more funding is needed – roughly $3.1 billion more – to finish the job.
While bigger ISPs can eat the costs of completely revamping their networks in this fashion, it’s a bigger issue for smaller ISPs already struggling to get by. Only $41 million of this $1.9 billion effort had been doled out as of the beginning of this year, and participants in the program say program administrator’s decision to only answer questions via email has slowed things down further.
Add to this COVID-era supply chain and labor issues, and actually doing what the government planned has proven both costly and cumbersome. Michigan Senator Gary Peters and FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks recently penned an editorial begging Congress for the money to complete the job, though this is the same Congress that just let the FCC’s spectrum auction authority lapse for no coherent reason.
While getting Chinese-made gear out of U.S. networks isn’t a terrible idea, you can see how the U.S. government may not be competent enough to actually walk the talk.
Clearly nobody really planned this “rip and replace” effort out well enough to actually fund it. And confirming that ISPs spend money sensibly and ethically also isn’t really the FCC’s strong suit.
This is of course all being overshadowed by the great TikTok moral panic of 2023, which sucked most of the oxygen policy out of the room, despite the fact that a ban of the social media app wouldn’t actually accomplish all that much. FCC Commissioners like Brendan Carr have gotten oodles of cable TV news attention for freaking out about TikTok, yet he’s been relatively quiet on this issue he actually regulates.
Meanwhile these expensive, incomplete efforts to combat Chinese surveillance of Americans still can’t seemingly convince Congress to actually pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers, something Chinese intelligence easily exploits. So yes, an impressive job all around.
Filed Under: china, chinese spying, fcc, intelligence, networks, privacy, rip and replace, telecom
Companies: huawei, zte
Comments on “Whoops: Congress Failed To Actually Fund Efforts To “Rip And Replace” Chinese Telecom Gear From U.S. Networks”
If that “spying” isn’t limited to gratuitous metadata collecting the they are doing something horribly wrong (though if the hardware was really compromised there would be other options, like DoS, DDoS/amplification, and other fun things from having control of part of the infrastructure). Anyhow: point is: if you are transmitting actual customer info (not just meta data, which goes toward impossible to fully secure from hostile infra) there that should (but I know it is not) be criminal negligence.
Anyhow replacing the devices isn’t a bad idea in principle, but the argument is both fallacious, AND strongly implies the whole thing is more than a little badly designed.
Re:
The most cogent objection here can be summed up in two words.
Kill switch.
What isn’t being said is that this is actually an effort designed by the big telcos (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast) to drive the 2,000+ small telcos out of business. There was no expectation that it would be properly funded.
Old knowledge
Its fun to learn things in the past.
That the Phone companies had a backdoor that the gov used.
The Military had a backdoor into the secure communications(which WERE not encoded)
That the Satellite system has one.
Good chance the internet has a Big one. And if they couldnt restrict it from servers seeing it from certain manufactures?
All guesses from whats already been done.
“What isn’t being said is that this is actually an effort designed by the big telcos (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast) to drive the 2,000+ small telcos out of business. There was no expectation that it would be properly funded.”
Not even close. At&t Verizon Comcast don’t want to mess with the small markets as most are a money pit. Verizon and att have been trying to get out of wireline for ever. There is also a reason att never attempted to gain us west and Verizon let go of the to frontier. Those big companies also didn’t remove the Chinese gear. They just make sure no government traffic hits the Chinese gear paths.
Why, it’s almost as though the entire thing was a grossly dishonest publicity stunt to play to the ‘China bad, be afraid!’ lot with no interest in actually following through once they had the soundbites they wanted…
Fatuous. The United States is not making the argument that it is morally wrong for China to spy on Americans. The argument is that spying on telecommunications is a useful tool which the USA does not want China to have access. This isn’t sports. ‘Fair play’ does not apply.
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