Chinese tech company, whose equipment is used by many rural wireless carriers, may be declared national security risk

House lawmakers are reportedly preparing to express concerns about Chinese tech companies whose equipment are used by a quarter of U.S. rural wireless carriers. A 2012 government report warned that the Chinese government could use Huawei and ZTE equipment for espionage, but carriers use it anyway because it's "apparently good and cheap," Mike Dano reports for tech site FierceWireless. The CEO of one wireless carrier, James Valley Telecommunications, said the company went with Huawei tech because it was 40 percent cheaper than the next cheapest option.

A group of House lawmakers is reportedly about to send a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who heads the Committee on Foreign Investment, warning that the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile would increase the risk that Huawei tech could be used in developing the nation's 5G infrastructure, which could make the U.S. more vulnerable to espionage. "Interestingly, as Recon Analytics analyst Roger Entner pointed out, the letter to Mnuchin apparently makes no mention of Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company and the firm that will own 42 percent of the combined Sprint and T-Mobile," Dano reports.

There's a lot at stake for Huawei, ZTE and their customers: in April the Federal Communications Commission banned any U.S. company that receives government money from using equipment from companies deemed a national security threat, Dano reports.

Seven rural wireless network operators, all of which use Huawei tech for much of their network, filed a comment with the Federal Communications Commission expressing their support for the company: United TelCom, which has 20,000 wireless customers in southwestern Kansas; SI Wireless, which has 20,000 customers in western Kentucky and Tennessee; Viaero, which has 110,000 mobile customers across eastern Colorado, western Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota; JVT, which has almost 10,000 customers in South Dakota; NE Colorado Cellular and United Telephone Association (no customer count provided for either)' Nemont Telephone Cooperative, which has almost 12,000 mobile customers in Montana and North Dakota through its subsidiary Sagebrush Cellular; and Union Telephone Company, which has nearly 40,000 customers in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho.

A Huawei executive in the U.S., Thomas Dowding, said in an FCC filing that the company doesn't threaten U.S. national security and said that the U.S. government had never found any deliberately compromised Huawei product in his his 15-year tenure at Huawei. 

"It’s hard not to link all the current noise over Chinese threats to national security back to Trump’s brewing trade war with the country. It seems clear that companies like ZTE and Qualcomm are probably being used as chess pieces in a broader game," Dano writes. "And if that’s the case, companies like United TelCom, Viaero and NE Colorado Cellular might need to prepare themselves to enter a chessboard where they will probably serve as pawns, not queens."