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From: Spiegel Online

By Hilmar Schmundt

Almost a third of the planet is thought to be using its products and yet few know much about the highly secretive Chinese telecommunication equipment company Huawei. Should customers be concerned about the company founder’s military background or the security vulnerabilities of its products?

The first problem is just saying the company’s name. Huawei is pronounced wah-way. It means something like “China acts!”

The second problem is its patriotic swagger. The telecommunications networking equipment and mobile phone supplier, based in the southeastern Chinese city of Shenzhen, is accused of secretly spreading high-tech spying devices around the world, having close ties with the Chinese military and supplying products to pariah states like Iran. A recent report by the Intelligence Committee of the United States House of Representatives warned against using the company’s products for critical telecommunications infrastructure. The Australian government has also blocked the company from bidding for contracts related to the construction of its national broadband network.

 

It would appear that Huawei cannot be stopped, though. At the international consumer electronics show opening in Las Vegas on January 8, the company will present the first mobile phone that uses the Windows Phone 8 operating system as well as a massive, souped-up mobile phone with a six-inch-plus display screen that puts it in the category of phone-tablet hybrids known as “phablets.”

In July, the company already introduced its “Ascend P1,” a respectable Android-based smartphone that is thinner than many rival products and boasts better battery life than the iPhone 5.

The Chinese company has its sites set on being able to make better smartphones than both Samsung and Apple soon. Though this might sound overly ambitious, Huawei means business. Some estimates hold that roughly a third of the world’s population already uses the company’s technologies in some way, often without being aware of it. Many Internet connections run through servers made by Huawei, and many mobile-phone calls are transmitted through the company’s base stations. In Germany, the first “surf sticks” using the ultra-fast LTE standard that were marketed by Deutsche Telekom, the country’s telecommunications giant, were built by Huawei.

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