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Exclusive | US telcos resigned to Huawei rip-and-replace law but want clarity on Washington’s reimbursement programme
- In the seventh instalment of an eight-part series on Huawei, Coco Feng, Sarah Dai and Jodi Xu Klein detail the ‘de-Huawei-isation’ campaign undertaken by Washington
- An April 22, deadline was extended by a month for US telcos to submit data to the FCC to comply with a law banning them from using subsidies to buy network gear from Huawei
Reading Time:7 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
In early 2013, two salesmen from a Chinese company introduced themselves to Jim Kail at a telecommunications industry trade show. Kail, president and CEO of a small rural carrier in the US state of Pennsylvania, had never heard of their company.
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Kail met them again over the summer that year and built up a rapport. Less than a year later LHTC Broadband ditched its US equipment vendor and went with the Chinese company, Huawei Technologies, because it was offering equipment that could do the job at two thirds of the price.
In fact, the rural carrier market has been one of the few areas of success in the US for Huawei, which has been shut out of the wider network equipment market due to Washington’s concerns about national security issues.
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“It was worth the risk of rolling the dice because it obviously could help us save a lot of money,” said Kail, who did due diligence on Huawei and found no proof that there was a security issue with its products – questions which have been raised multiple times by Washington.
But fast forward to today and LHTC, along with every other US rural carrier, will have to rip out Huawei gear and replace it with European or US suppliers – or lose federal government financial support.
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