Just read NYT article about Huawei, which was linked from WierelessWire News in Japan.

I have been WELL aware of Huawei's push into the U.S. market, through their huge presence in trade shows and Silicon Valley events for the past year or so. It is another "deja vu" from 90's when Korean vendors tried to enter into the U.S. infrastructure market.

I was at a start-up carrier at that time and LG was making really aggressive offer with a very generous vendor financing. So I am suspecting that Huawei is making a similar offer, basically to "lend money", to get a symbolic first major contract in the U.S.

Korea is basically an U.S. ally and is not considered any political threat to the U.S., and still, LG could not make much inroads into the U.S. telecom infra market back in the 90's, despite their big effort.

I wonder if Chinese, who holds a very different view of the world from the U.S. people, could break through this barrier, after 15 years since Koreans' failure. Of course, the time is different. 15 years ago, there were more vendor choices for carriers, including North-American native such as Lucent and Nortel, but they are gone. The only other choices are European vendors, such as Ericsson, NokiaSiemens and Alcatel-Lucent, who picked up the remains of the NA vendors.

Looking at it from Sprint's point of view, I can understand that they are THAT desperate right now, needing financing for the next generation investment. But again, "deja vu" feeling comes up for me. When they selected WiMax for their 2.6GHz spectrum holdings, I suspect it was not exactly a technical merit decision, but guess there was some monetary distortion going on with the vendors. I mean, they are private company and it is OK to make decisions based on "various considerations", but "distorted" decision could cause a "distorted" result - that is the risk they are running.

At least back in the 90's, I was surprised at the level of "political/national security" influence into the telecom infra world in the U.S., and I really wonder if it was so much changed since then. If so, Sprint may go into another chaos. Hmmm....

Michi