The subsidy days are (mostly) gone. Now they pay the full MSRP, but financed at 0% interest for 2 years.
In fact, they pay more than MSRP if you consider the fact you're forced to attach a phone plan which costs more than the equivalent plan from an MVNO using the same network.
The time value of money is still a subsidy. The average American consumer has stacks of debt (credit card, student loan, etc) which makes fronting $1k for a phone more difficult.
If you can’t afford 1k for a phone you shouldn’t finance it.
We’re not talking about a house or a car, it’s a 1,000$ phone that can have 90% of it's features replicated by a phone that cost as much as the down payment on the 1k phone that someone with maxed out credit will have to pay.
Yes, but this seems to be unique to the US market. In countries where people don't earn as much, getting a subsidized phone via the carrier doesn't seem to be the case.
The monthly discount that Canadian carriers offer for bringing your own phone is generally lower than the value of the phone. So why would I pay upfront if the model I want is available from the carrier?
All the Canadian carriers are such assholes I can't bring myself to sign a long term contract with them.
It's also nice to have an unlocked retail phone. Much cheaper to get a SIM from a vending machine at the airport anywhere outside North America than to suffer Canadian carriers' insane roaming charges.
> I've never understood why people buy phones from the carriers rather than from a retail store or online and insert the SIM (for GSM carriers).
Cultural momentum. In the US, phones used to be heavily subsidized by carriers via contracts. Even if you brought your own phone, and don't think the carriers gave you a big enough discount to make it economically justifiable, so the practice of buying "unlocked" phones never took off and was more of a niche thing.
That's all changed recently, with the death of long-term contracts, but old habits die hard.
Verizon also used to not allow unlocked phones on their network. If the phone was not Verizon branded you were forbidden from using it. I'm not sure if that's still the case.
No longer the case. However, they only allow devices that are certified to work on their network, and that means support for legacy CDMA. But if your phone is unlocked and it has the necessary bits, you can certainly bring it in. Also, all smartphones they currently sell are unlocked, as part of a deal with the FCC when they won the rights to some 700Mhz band
Depending on what credit card one uses for the purchase, one could get anywhere from 1.5% to 5% cash back (assuming they pay the balance in full before the credit card statement due date).
I pay my cell phone bill with a credit card anyway, so I still get the points, independent of how I bought the device. (I also use Ting and have bought the phones outright, but even previously on Sprint and AT&T with subsidized phones, I still got the points every month in addition to the device subsidy.)
A 2 year loan for $500 is 24 chances for me to forget to make a payment, for a glitch to cause my bank / cc to not pay them on time, for them to somehow not notice that I have paid them when I actually did, etc etc etc, any of which will either result in me eating some costs (completely eliminating the benefit of the 0% loan) or burning 1-10 hours on the phone with some clowns.
What am I losing, whatever I would have made by investing that $500 over the same time period ? We're talking less than $50. I'm very lucky to be at a point in my life where I'd gladly give away "$50, 2 years from now" in exchange for "don't have to think about it, ever again".
True. For a variety of reasons, cell phones in the US don't follow typical economic patterns of similarly priced items. Most people still lease and/or finance them, and insure them. Concerning insurance, using a shared risk pool to insure against an easily coverable expense (replacement cost) and fairly common event(damage/loss) is a bit of an anomoly. A combination of convienience and unfamiliarity with the technology have created(or allowed carriers to create/promote) this phenomenon
That is true, but at least using a right type of credit card will actually result in you paying less than the principal amount of the loan (which can't be matched by a 0% loan in terms of the amount you end up paying).
You don't understand why people would pick a small monthly fee over a four figure purchase price for a phone? Because very few people have the savings or extra money to do so.
Because the carrier's don't/didn't offer any discount for bringing your own device. If they're effectively offering you a 0% loan over two years to pay off a phone it's not the craziest thing to take them up on that offer. Plus, if it breaks you can just take it to your nearest store. A lot more convenient than mailing it somewhere.
My ATT plan has BYOD so I save $15 per line over 2 years (=$360) to not have to worry about arguing with a carrier over whether I can unlock MY device. Surprise, it's about the cost of the 'subsidy'. Back when they had subsidies, that is, I think now you just lease to own. All I know is, I'm not getting anything for free with their garbage so I'll just by my own. If my phone costs $1000, I damn well want to know what it's costing me and consciously make that decision, not have it hidden in a payment.
Shoe doesn't feel as nice on the other foot I guess.
In all honestly from the few products I see that come across the various tech review outlets I follow, Huawei seems to do some decent work. But the whole economic situation with China is complicated...mostly due to their own heavy handed protectionist policies.
From a cursory following, it certainly seems like the Chinese market in particular is biased at regulatory levels against foreign companies.
Yeah. I was about to say don’t get mad at the West, because we don’t trust you, get mad at your own government. If China was a free and open society to the point where I could simply understand the relationship their businesses have with their government than we don’t have a problem, but that relationship is just too murky for my liking right now.
If there is an effect on the US consumer, it's at the wireless service level not phone level.
>Huawei engineers and executives also make regular visits to U.S. carriers to show off new technology, and the potential cost savings are “significant”—sometimes even half off competitors’ prices, says one former U.S. telecom executive.
>U.S. wireless service costs $41 per month per customer on average, according to the data and analytics firm—second only to Canada, which also largely discourages Huawei equipment. In the U.K., where Huawei is allowed but closely scrutinized, the average wireless bill is $23 a month.
Does anyone really believe that even I f the US carriers saved 50% on capital costs by purchasing Huawei products, they would pass these savings into the consumer?
China is a centrally planned economy isn't it, if that's the measure against which you compare the openness and political interference in your supposed free market economy then I think you've got major problems.
No, this is something that doesn't exist in reality, or doesn't work to be precise. China is capitalist, in fact more capitalist than pretty much any western country, but only when it comes to domestic market. Towards the west they're ultra protectionist.
Lots of its companies are state-run or otherwise state-owned. It definitely takes some "capitalist" practices to the next level compared to the rest, but it is its own weird thing.
I got a Huawei international hotspot since I couldn't find any familiar brands offering one that worked well where I wanted to go, and I was impressed by the price, packaging, and the product itself. Huawei makes good products.
Protectionist is a good way of describing it. The general strategy in China is to handicap foreign corporations sufficiently so that domestic competitors can establish a foothold in the market before the network effects of foreign companies become stifling to new entrants.
This is especially true of tech companies. Chinese Internet censors degrade the quality of major US corporations so much that their products are nearly unusable, thus opening opportunities for domestic competitors. We’ve seen this play out with Google/Baidu, Facebook/Weibo, Uber/Didi, Amazon/Alibaba, etc.
Most people see the Great Firewall (GFW) as a tool for suppression of political dissent. However it also serves as an effective tool for economic control, protectionism and favoritism. In college I took a class called “The Next China,” where I argued in my final paper that the GFW serves primarily as a tool for economic control, and only secondarily as a political tool. Realistically, there are arguments to be made that maintaining the GFW is in the best interest of the Chinese state, its economy and its people. It has certainly benefited them so far, as China now has a thriving domestic economy that is becoming more vertically integrated and service-driven every day.
Before anyone gets too upset about this, consider that the US often does the same, albeit on more of a regulatory level than a political one. Some examples are import taxes, financial compliance requirements, and upcoming data regulation. These all serve as tools that implicitly favor domestic companies over foreign ones.
> Protectionist is a good way of describing it. The general strategy in China is to handicap foreign corporations sufficiently so that domestic competitors can establish a foothold in the market before the network effects of foreign companies become stifling to new entrants.
They also dangle the carrot of access to their market in front of Western companies in order to encourage up-front technology and skill transfer. In the end, it's only to benefit their domestic companies as the western ones are eventually hobbled and shut out.
And, of course, if consumers really want your device, they can just buy it and activate it on their network. Nobody's locking anyone out of anything. The first few phones I bought were done this way. I even used UK or European chargers on US adapters just to keep my phone topped off back in the "bad old days" when chargers were not (relatively) universal.
Read on the WSJ a few days ago how Huawei got started was straight stealing the exact same patented technology as an American firm and then could produce more cheaply thanks to government help.
America has to act now to prevent this kind of stuff, not just place a bandaid. Huawei is now cheaper and better than competitors but their model has been something Chinese and let's be honest most other countries have tried to implement. Props to them though
It's not really a secret. The history section of their wikipedia article explains they were founded as a way to reverse engineer foreign technology and are state sponsored. I guess many people don't know this?
> Folklore within the routing and switching community was that Huawei stole router product secrets from Cisco, down to the chassis, IOS and all the way down to the spelling errors in the manuals. Many have said it for years, but 60 Minutes put it on worldwide television tonight for everyone to know. Cisco did file suit and it was settled out of court, so we will never know what really happened. But Huawei did it, they know it, we know and Cisco knows it. Otherwise they would have never settled the court case.
Skip to page 7 for the investigation.. or bottom of page 12 where it starts talking about Huawei.
Some of it could be political cover.. but some of it sounds quite solid. Like the part about their business in Iran, which they admit having and refused to discontinue, possibly violating US sanctions.
That report was just NSA being mad for not being able to intercept Huawei routers just like they intercepted and hacked Cisco routers. [1]
And let's not forget NSA's Juniper router NSA backdoor hack [2].
So the NSA banned Huawei since they wouldn't play ball with them and decided to spread FUD about Huawei instead... so that companies buy hacked/backdoored routers instead.
Who says they don’t have exploits for their tech? Just as I would expect the PLA to have multiple exploits for us tech. Step out of the bubble you live in, espionage is real and so far there’s enough compelling evidence to question their motives. Just as there were constant rublings with Kaspersky, look where that went. Not only did their reaction turn out to be an attempt st saving face, researches showed that simply putting specific classification markings on blank files triggered the av to submit copies of the files.
This is such a bizarre comment. Why would the NSA even try to get a Chinese company controlled by a former PLA officer to "play ball" and install implants? What reason is there to think the NSA can't intercept Huawei routers.* Why do you think the NSA makes decisions based on being "mad" (was it replaced by a seven year old without informing me)?
* It'd probably be more difficult for them to get at a Huawei, since the routers don't go through US export inspections, just like everything else made outside the US. However, the could still have the cooperation of or agents working for the shipping companies to help them in those cases.
As a Canadian, I'm sure I know a large number of former Nortel employees who would just love to get their hands on a Huawei phone. Nortel did the R&D, and Huawei released identical devices, all the while someone in China was hacking into their systems and downloading their designs.[0]
But sure, it's Huawei who are the victims in all of this.
I'm sorry, but this strikes me as ridiculously ironic. A Chinese company complaining that they're having a hard time reaching consumers in the US market? Is that not EXACTLY the same situation that countless American companies (esp. "Big Tech") face when trying to enter the Chinese market? To pass this off as "US is hurting its consumers by eliminating choice" is laughable vs the INSANE concessions US companies need to make to operate in China — which create hugely unfair advantages for domestic Chinese companies.
Is privacy the big reason? The article cites privacy as one of the pressures that caused AT&T to abort the deal — US companies don't want to let the government eavesdrop on their products, and Chinese government doesn't want US products and services that prevent the Chinese government from eavesdropping.
Dude called out the US for generally lacking on the mobile front, and I don't think he's wrong. Our mobile broadband speeds are terrible for a developed country largely because of the mobile carrier (and wired broadband) oligopoly.
If the CEO of Nokia said the same thing, would it be any more or less valid just because of the policies of the country that they're based in?
Yes. This is Communist China we're talking about here. They take eavesdropping to the next level.
> Dude called out the US for generally lacking on the mobile front, and I don't think he's wrong. Our mobile broadband speeds are terrible for a developed country largely because of the mobile carrier (and wired broadband) oligopoly.
You don't know what you're talking about. China's mobile network is a frigging state-owned oligopoly that, the favored carrier of which uses a weird and inferior TD-SCDMA protocol purely for political reasons. We've got it good compared to them. Source: https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-rac/
You're absolutely right about the protocol, but protocol does not a complete wireless ecosystem make. You could have a shitty protocol and happy customers, or a great protocol and upset customers.
Also, just because two industries are dominated by oligopolies doesn't mean that consumers in both are suffering the same. One can put the customers' interest slightly ahead of another. It's like having the assumption that authoritarianism automatically means people are suffering. It's just unhealthy and unstable. Every once in a while you can still get benevolent dictators doing something nice ;)
Just from personal experience, I know the cell phone fees in China are a lower % of people's incomes than here. The speeds aren't amazing (but that's probably because I rarely browse any domestic sites while in China). But I've also never had a dropped call or lack of signal until I got waaaaaaaay out in the mountains / rural parts of China, where as here I will still occasionally get my calls dropped or have spotty reception near a well-populated suburb.
>US companies don't want to let the government eavesdrop on their products, and Chinese government doesn't want US products and services that prevent the Chinese government from eavesdropping.
Rather, US companies get pressure from the government to make it so that only the US eavesdropping works on devices. ATT has quite a history here. I don't think he's wrong; why are most devices here only available through carriers?
We’re #28. Among the 62 countries included in the latest
State of the Internet Report from Akamai Technologies, the
United States ranks 28th for average mobile Internet
speed.
China puts their thumb on the scale when it comes to foreign companies operating in China, true. Does that mean that us doing the same is the best course of action? Many US companies practice profit offshoring, tax evasion / minimization, and lobbying to reduce their tax costs.
I don't believe that trying to look at this through the lens of ~what country is more hypocritical is very useful. US mobile broadband sucks, US mobile carriers suck, and the market for phones here for consumers isn't as good as it could be.
> story here. I don't think he's wrong; why are most devices here only available through carriers?
This is a rather facetious argument backed by the unsubstantiated premise that if most devices are “only available through carriers,” that it must be a ploy to integrate more citizens into the surveillance apparatus.
It may indeed be true that consumers relying on phone contracts to purchase their devices unavoidably become trapped in a net of surveillance. However, attributing that to malice on the part of the carriers is intellectually irresponsible.
The carriers offer “discounted” phones, quite simply, because they make more money that way, due to financing agreements and contractual lock-in. Perhaps a side effect is consumers locking themselves into surveillance. But it’s irresponsible to posit that this result, a side effect, is also the motivator behind the contractual schemes. The carriers offer these options for one reason and one reason only: because it makes them money.
How about we put it this way: Both Chinese and US consumers lose when their respective governments engage in arbitrary protectionism. You can find his comments "ironic" all you want, that doesn't mean his complaint doesn't have any merit.
It's like if Kid A complained about how getting bullied by Kid B's older brother sucks and you're like HA your complaint is laughable and insane because Kid A's brother is a bully, too!
If you presented evidence on why it's reasonable to suspect Huawei for being complicit in espionage in their hardware devices (and why other countries don't seem to be that worried about it), then you'd have a compelling counterpoint.
I agree entirely with your point that there is fault on both sides here. That's precisely what makes it ironic (see [3], in particular!). A better analogy would be that Kid A is bullying Kid B, and in response, Kid B starts bullying back. Ideally, this causes Kid A to "get a taste of his own medicine" and stops bullying Kid B.
That's how I hope the situation will end up, at least.
Right, your cited sources would actually be a more sound counterpoint than your original comment. Maybe it was just a spur of the moment thing. I guess my point is that if you want to get across the point that Huawei's comments are ironic, then attacking from the angle that there's good reason for AT&T to pull out of the deal and for the US govt to be suspicious would be much more effective.
The Kid A vs Kid B isn't really the situation here as it's the CEO of a company from country A complaining about country B influencing the decisions of a company from country B. That's why injected the bullying older brothers to help with the analogy. If Huawei actually screwed over AT&T in the past and now AT&T pulls out of a deal with Huawei and Huawei complains, then the Kids A/B bullying each other would be an accurate analogy.
Incidentally I've seen the Chinese government basically hype up problems or impropriety of foreign companies (e.g. Apple) in the past in order to bully them in to compliance. I'm not saying that the US government is doing the same thing to Huawei here, but the cynic in me also isn't ruling that angle out either :/
They are the same company with a fatal boot loop design flaw on my $500 Nexus N6. That thing failed right after the 1 year warranty expired and they tell me there is no way to fix it as there are no replacement parts available. If it failed after 2 years I could have lived with it but 1 year is too short for outright failure. Right now I'm trying to get a claim through my credit card extended warranty to get my money reimbursed.
I worked for a startup that worked with huawei for a few months -- we installed a heavy analytics platform onto their android devices for quite some time, receiving a disturbing amount of very granular (read: personally identifying) information to s3/bigquery in american servers. The company already was working on existing malware projects that were extremely profitable, some over 10 years old.
The deal fell through shortly after android 7, these changes [1] were pretty significant . The application remains on some smaller brands of 'obamaphone' and select huawei devices. It would not surprise me if they found another company to install a similar application. I do not trust this company, they were very strange to work with as far as politics were concerned even with guidance from Chinese native project managers.
American telecom market is a joke. Only very few Americans buy their own phone. So you have to make deals with the big carriers if you want to reach beyond the technophile crowd. Those carriers are shit.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadIn fact, they pay more than MSRP if you consider the fact you're forced to attach a phone plan which costs more than the equivalent plan from an MVNO using the same network.
We’re not talking about a house or a car, it’s a 1,000$ phone that can have 90% of it's features replicated by a phone that cost as much as the down payment on the 1k phone that someone with maxed out credit will have to pay.
Consumers gonna consume.
The monthly discount that Canadian carriers offer for bringing your own phone is generally lower than the value of the phone. So why would I pay upfront if the model I want is available from the carrier?
It's also nice to have an unlocked retail phone. Much cheaper to get a SIM from a vending machine at the airport anywhere outside North America than to suffer Canadian carriers' insane roaming charges.
Cultural momentum. In the US, phones used to be heavily subsidized by carriers via contracts. Even if you brought your own phone, and don't think the carriers gave you a big enough discount to make it economically justifiable, so the practice of buying "unlocked" phones never took off and was more of a niche thing.
That's all changed recently, with the death of long-term contracts, but old habits die hard.
Luckily LTE means we're seeing the back of all this, though I think you still need a CDMA phone for areas that do not yet have LTE.
At 0% interest, why wouldn't you?
What am I losing, whatever I would have made by investing that $500 over the same time period ? We're talking less than $50. I'm very lucky to be at a point in my life where I'd gladly give away "$50, 2 years from now" in exchange for "don't have to think about it, ever again".
Are the payments for those "loans" included in the buyers cell phone bill? So no extra payment to remember.
To be pedantic, that's wrong. Most people make $300 to $500 purchases with a credit card, which is a type of loan.
There are phones that are quite a bit cheaper than that.
Now it's "pay X dollars a month 24 months".
In all honestly from the few products I see that come across the various tech review outlets I follow, Huawei seems to do some decent work. But the whole economic situation with China is complicated...mostly due to their own heavy handed protectionist policies.
From a cursory following, it certainly seems like the Chinese market in particular is biased at regulatory levels against foreign companies.
This decision does affect US consumers, but not in a significant way...we still have access to cheap smartphones.
Chinese companies can't have their cake and eat it too!
>Huawei engineers and executives also make regular visits to U.S. carriers to show off new technology, and the potential cost savings are “significant”—sometimes even half off competitors’ prices, says one former U.S. telecom executive.
>U.S. wireless service costs $41 per month per customer on average, according to the data and analytics firm—second only to Canada, which also largely discourages Huawei equipment. In the U.K., where Huawei is allowed but closely scrutinized, the average wireless bill is $23 a month.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-long-seen-as-spy-threat-...
No, this is something that doesn't exist in reality, or doesn't work to be precise. China is capitalist, in fact more capitalist than pretty much any western country, but only when it comes to domestic market. Towards the west they're ultra protectionist.
Lots of its companies are state-run or otherwise state-owned. It definitely takes some "capitalist" practices to the next level compared to the rest, but it is its own weird thing.
This is especially true of tech companies. Chinese Internet censors degrade the quality of major US corporations so much that their products are nearly unusable, thus opening opportunities for domestic competitors. We’ve seen this play out with Google/Baidu, Facebook/Weibo, Uber/Didi, Amazon/Alibaba, etc.
Most people see the Great Firewall (GFW) as a tool for suppression of political dissent. However it also serves as an effective tool for economic control, protectionism and favoritism. In college I took a class called “The Next China,” where I argued in my final paper that the GFW serves primarily as a tool for economic control, and only secondarily as a political tool. Realistically, there are arguments to be made that maintaining the GFW is in the best interest of the Chinese state, its economy and its people. It has certainly benefited them so far, as China now has a thriving domestic economy that is becoming more vertically integrated and service-driven every day.
Before anyone gets too upset about this, consider that the US often does the same, albeit on more of a regulatory level than a political one. Some examples are import taxes, financial compliance requirements, and upcoming data regulation. These all serve as tools that implicitly favor domestic companies over foreign ones.
They also dangle the carrot of access to their market in front of Western companies in order to encourage up-front technology and skill transfer. In the end, it's only to benefit their domestic companies as the western ones are eventually hobbled and shut out.
America has to act now to prevent this kind of stuff, not just place a bandaid. Huawei is now cheaper and better than competitors but their model has been something Chinese and let's be honest most other countries have tried to implement. Props to them though
It's not really a secret. The history section of their wikipedia article explains they were founded as a way to reverse engineer foreign technology and are state sponsored. I guess many people don't know this?
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60...:
> Folklore within the routing and switching community was that Huawei stole router product secrets from Cisco, down to the chassis, IOS and all the way down to the spelling errors in the manuals. Many have said it for years, but 60 Minutes put it on worldwide television tonight for everyone to know. Cisco did file suit and it was settled out of court, so we will never know what really happened. But Huawei did it, they know it, we know and Cisco knows it. Otherwise they would have never settled the court case.
Skip to page 7 for the investigation.. or bottom of page 12 where it starts talking about Huawei.
Some of it could be political cover.. but some of it sounds quite solid. Like the part about their business in Iran, which they admit having and refused to discontinue, possibly violating US sanctions.
And let's not forget NSA's Juniper router NSA backdoor hack [2].
So the NSA banned Huawei since they wouldn't play ball with them and decided to spread FUD about Huawei instead... so that companies buy hacked/backdoored routers instead.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/juniper-networks-hidden-backdo...
* It'd probably be more difficult for them to get at a Huawei, since the routers don't go through US export inspections, just like everything else made outside the US. However, the could still have the cooperation of or agents working for the shipping companies to help them in those cases.
But sure, it's Huawei who are the victims in all of this.
[0] http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-aga...
Is privacy the big reason? The article cites privacy as one of the pressures that caused AT&T to abort the deal — US companies don't want to let the government eavesdrop on their products, and Chinese government doesn't want US products and services that prevent the Chinese government from eavesdropping.
- Spy, eavesdrop wherever they can. Forcing vendors to turn over server controls to them.
- Constantly duplicate, steal other companies work.
- Create unfair advantages of China companies vs US companies.
- Can't forget the Great China Firewall!
Huawei is untrustworthy anyway, good riddance. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Espionage_and_security_...
Dude called out the US for generally lacking on the mobile front, and I don't think he's wrong. Our mobile broadband speeds are terrible for a developed country largely because of the mobile carrier (and wired broadband) oligopoly.
If the CEO of Nokia said the same thing, would it be any more or less valid just because of the policies of the country that they're based in?
edit: typo
Yes. This is Communist China we're talking about here. They take eavesdropping to the next level.
> Dude called out the US for generally lacking on the mobile front, and I don't think he's wrong. Our mobile broadband speeds are terrible for a developed country largely because of the mobile carrier (and wired broadband) oligopoly.
You don't know what you're talking about. China's mobile network is a frigging state-owned oligopoly that, the favored carrier of which uses a weird and inferior TD-SCDMA protocol purely for political reasons. We've got it good compared to them. Source: https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-rac/
Whoa there. That escalated quickly.
You're absolutely right about the protocol, but protocol does not a complete wireless ecosystem make. You could have a shitty protocol and happy customers, or a great protocol and upset customers.
Also, just because two industries are dominated by oligopolies doesn't mean that consumers in both are suffering the same. One can put the customers' interest slightly ahead of another. It's like having the assumption that authoritarianism automatically means people are suffering. It's just unhealthy and unstable. Every once in a while you can still get benevolent dictators doing something nice ;)
Just from personal experience, I know the cell phone fees in China are a lower % of people's incomes than here. The speeds aren't amazing (but that's probably because I rarely browse any domestic sites while in China). But I've also never had a dropped call or lack of signal until I got waaaaaaaay out in the mountains / rural parts of China, where as here I will still occasionally get my calls dropped or have spotty reception near a well-populated suburb.
Rather, US companies get pressure from the government to make it so that only the US eavesdropping works on devices. ATT has quite a history here. I don't think he's wrong; why are most devices here only available through carriers?
http://time.com/money/4808996/fastest-internet-countries-mob...
China puts their thumb on the scale when it comes to foreign companies operating in China, true. Does that mean that us doing the same is the best course of action? Many US companies practice profit offshoring, tax evasion / minimization, and lobbying to reduce their tax costs.I don't believe that trying to look at this through the lens of ~what country is more hypocritical is very useful. US mobile broadband sucks, US mobile carriers suck, and the market for phones here for consumers isn't as good as it could be.
This is a rather facetious argument backed by the unsubstantiated premise that if most devices are “only available through carriers,” that it must be a ploy to integrate more citizens into the surveillance apparatus.
It may indeed be true that consumers relying on phone contracts to purchase their devices unavoidably become trapped in a net of surveillance. However, attributing that to malice on the part of the carriers is intellectually irresponsible.
The carriers offer “discounted” phones, quite simply, because they make more money that way, due to financing agreements and contractual lock-in. Perhaps a side effect is consumers locking themselves into surveillance. But it’s irresponsible to posit that this result, a side effect, is also the motivator behind the contractual schemes. The carriers offer these options for one reason and one reason only: because it makes them money.
It's like if Kid A complained about how getting bullied by Kid B's older brother sucks and you're like HA your complaint is laughable and insane because Kid A's brother is a bully, too!
If you presented evidence on why it's reasonable to suspect Huawei for being complicit in espionage in their hardware devices (and why other countries don't seem to be that worried about it), then you'd have a compelling counterpoint.
[1] Former head of CIA: Huawei engaged in espionage for Chinese state:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0719/Former-head-o...
[2] Huawei spied, US federal jury finds:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/huawei_spied_us_jur...
[3] U.S. Suspicions of China's Huawei Based Partly on NSA's Own Spy Tricks
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/us-su...
I agree entirely with your point that there is fault on both sides here. That's precisely what makes it ironic (see [3], in particular!). A better analogy would be that Kid A is bullying Kid B, and in response, Kid B starts bullying back. Ideally, this causes Kid A to "get a taste of his own medicine" and stops bullying Kid B.
That's how I hope the situation will end up, at least.
The Kid A vs Kid B isn't really the situation here as it's the CEO of a company from country A complaining about country B influencing the decisions of a company from country B. That's why injected the bullying older brothers to help with the analogy. If Huawei actually screwed over AT&T in the past and now AT&T pulls out of a deal with Huawei and Huawei complains, then the Kids A/B bullying each other would be an accurate analogy.
Incidentally I've seen the Chinese government basically hype up problems or impropriety of foreign companies (e.g. Apple) in the past in order to bully them in to compliance. I'm not saying that the US government is doing the same thing to Huawei here, but the cynic in me also isn't ruling that angle out either :/
China is halfway around the world and many of us will never go there.
On the other hand using phones provided by US carriers means the government here is probably spying on you.
China, however will probably never send people to knock your door down based on intel they gather from your phone.
The deal fell through shortly after android 7, these changes [1] were pretty significant . The application remains on some smaller brands of 'obamaphone' and select huawei devices. It would not surprise me if they found another company to install a similar application. I do not trust this company, they were very strange to work with as far as politics were concerned even with guidance from Chinese native project managers.
[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/changes-to...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-10/china-off...
Seems to me that the US should use more of it’s leverage ($400b annual trade deficit) to ensure better market access to China.