[trout]

disclaimer: I work for Cisco.

I think there are some legitimate concerns. The other competitors aren't known to have the level of corporate espionage as Huawei has shown, the level of direct government influence, and telecom is gaining importance in national security.

Manufacturing equipment in China and producing Telecom equipment and software are different concepts for security. For example, all telecom equipment in the US has to allow "lawful intercept"[1], and part of LI is it cannot be detected whether it is enabled or not. I think if an issue was to escalate to the level of national security, both the US and China would be willing to make use of these features. I'm more willing to believe that China would build in their own form of LI without publicizing it, since the government is more directly involved in the decisions of ZTE/Huawei. If the next front of war is on the internet, this is a considerable risk.

From what I understand - the Chinese government has the ability to say "If you don't drop the suit against [Chinese Company] we will block your product sales in China". I can't find a source, but I remember hearing a similar incident.

This idea is also not new - India is on a similar path to locally source telecom equipment: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-15/news...

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

[oasisbob]

and part of LI is it cannot be detected whether it is enabled or not.

Interestingly, I've heard that although the LI is supposed to be transparent, it's typically very apparent to network operators when their kit is actively involved in LI, as the CPU utilization shows telltale signs.

[invaliddata]

That is true if the CPU is responsible for data plane operations. For a lot of modern equipment, most traffic never hits the CPU (it's handled by a special asic or other packet processor) and so you wouldn't know if if LI is active.