Quest To Replace Chinese Gear In U.S. Telecom Networks Is A Hot, Under-funded Mess

Broadband

from the sorry,-we're-not-competent dept

As the U.S. has tried to untether itself from Chinese tech, one major policy goal by both parties has been to purge U.S. telecom networks of Chinese telecom gear. The worry (sometimes substantiated, sometimes not) is that Chinese intelligence has embedded all manner of nefarious backdoors in sensitive telecommunications gear (you’re to ignore that the U.S. also routinely does this).

Not too surprisingly, after nearly a decade of politicians screaming about the urgent need to remove Chinese telecom gear from U.S. networks (some of it being simply the self-serving lobbying agitation by competitors like Cisco), the effort to actually do so has proven to be a hot mess.

Congress and the FCC failed to competently provide the money needed to actually replace Chinese gear with more expensive alternatives, resulting in widespread delays. 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 administrators’ decision to only answer questions via email has slowed things down further.

Now the New York Times’ Cecilia Kang has a good profile piece on these “rip and replace” efforts, showcasing how the dysfunction has been hardest for smaller companies already struggling to stay afloat. Big, government-pampered companies like AT&T can eat some of the costs, but smaller companies can’t, making getting competitive coverage to remote areas harder than ever:

The program’s burden has fallen disproportionately on smaller carriers, which relied more on the cheaper gear from the Chinese firms than large companies like AT&T and Verizon. Given rip-and-replace’s difficulties, some smaller wireless companies now say they may not be able to upgrade their networks and continue serving their communities, where they are often the only internet providers.

“For many rural communities, they are faced with the disastrous choice of having to continue to use insecure networks that are ripe for surveillance or having to cut off their services,” said Geoffrey Starks, a Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C.

As of January, the FCC stated it had received 126 applications for funding beyond what it could actually reimburse, and the FCC says it can probably get around to funding about 40 percent of the needed funds. Eventually.

Oddly the New York Times fails to note that the Republican budget plan and debt ceiling standoff they’ve instigated will make the problem worse. The same Republicans who got on cable news freaking out about the potential perils of Chinese telecom surveillance, are now pushing a budget that would strip funding away from what’s already proven to be a woefully underfunded program:

A Democratic aide for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record, said the bill “risks unraveling several, popular bipartisan programs.”

“This bill revokes funding for students’ internet connectivity, accurate broadband mapping, and ensuring our communications equipment is protected from espionage and disruption by hostile foreign governments like China,” the aide said.

In that sense politicians (particularly of the Republican variety) got to nab cable appearances and headlines about how they were being “tough on China” and were “super concerned about U.S. citizen privacy,” without having to actually, competently, follow through.

This, of course, is happening while those same politicians also enjoy endless cable appearances for hyperventilating about TikTok, while ignoring the privacy and security pitfalls of failing to regulate data brokers or pass a competent privacy law. Chinese hysteria is often a big dumb dance, heavily peppered by lobbyists and incompetent xenophobes, that routinely falls short of any actual goal.

Filed Under: 5g, chinese intelligence, digital divide, networking, nsa, rip and replace, surveillance, telecom, wireless