I don't get why Huawei gets specific hate? Shouldn't this equally apply to all Chinese vendors? I wouldn't expect any are less susceptible to government control?
ZTE is also under scrutiny. The reason it's only Huawei and ZTE is that other Chinese providers are so insignificant that the telecoms will likely be able to replace the infrastructure themselves with spares or consolidation. However, in an emergency, the government would have to foot the bill for replacing Huawei/ZTE systems quickly, as the telecoms couldn't finance this and lack of capacity would mean very high prices.
Huawei simply accumulated a much more court-defensible paper trail—dominant presence, documented code issues, clearer evidence of state leverage, and heavier export-control exposure.
Huawei is often blamed for stealing information from Nortel that led to Nortel’s bankruptcy, both information about deals being made that let Huawei undercut them and technical product details that allowed Huawei to more easily be a substitute for Nortel products
Nortel collapsed long before Huawei even started competing outside of China in any serious way.
Nortel was severely hit by the bursting of the tech bubble, and then it got caught faking its financial figures. To blame that on Huawei is just a rewrite of history.
If true, how did that have any effect on Nortel? As I said before, Huawei wasn't a serious competitor for Nortel at that point. Nortel's business fell apart (and it started fudging its financials) long before Huawei expanded globally.
The concern comes from the legal environment these companies operate in. Any vendor that can be compelled by its government to cooperate in ways we can’t verify becomes a risk in critical infrastructure.
