Tom Morgan

The Huawei decision does not make technological sense

We’re fairly used to this government’s IT blunders now. Only recently there was the fiasco of the NHS coronavirus app – it was predicted here that it would be ‘dead-on-arrival’, weeks before the government was eventually forced to admit the same.

Now with each passing month comes yet another poor decision by the UK. The latest of which is the plan to remove Huawei from UK 5G infrastructure over the next seven years. Politically, the justification is sensible. Technologically, it borders on farcical.

To understand the Huawei issue, it’s best to think of a simple home network, involving a modem, a WiFi router and a smart TV. All three of these devices play some role in delivering the latest episode of your favourite Netflix series. The UK’s telecoms infrastructure is similar. Just as the Netflix episode will pass through your modem and router to your TV, so a signal is passed from Point A to Point B via a number of pieces of hardware: primarily cables, telecoms masts and signal decoding boxes. The Huawei kit we are now destined to remove at great cost is one of those pieces of hardware, and it plays a vital role in ensuring the signal can be delivered at high speed and low cost.

The important thing to understand is that the signal that passes through Huawei’s hardware is encrypted at all times – similar to how your messages over WhatsApp cannot be read by Facebook. The overall control of the signal does not belong to any of the individual components, just by virtue of passing through them. It belongs to the UK.

The suggestion is that Huawei – and for Huawei, read China – has a mysterious way of remotely accessing their hardware on the UK network (which is reasonable), and then is processing the data on it to send back to China (which is not).

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