PeterGray wrote:So we're supporting Trump's push for US tech companies against Chinese. It will put back 5G by 2 years or so and cost around 2bn. There are no obvious business benefits to UK companies - we will now have to buy from the US, who will have an effective monoply, that they will use.
This is America First. Pure and simple.
It's not so much about 5G suppliers (Nokia and Ericsson aren't American), but rather about the IoT ecosystem. We've already had more than a year of our deployment being held back by uncertainty, now we're being held back again - by years.
Holding the UK (and as many others as possible) back gives US companies the best possible head-start in the IP land-grab, and proliferation of patents, that will come out of the IoT. This isn't companies we've heard about (yet), it's the next generation of Unicorns.
Think back 20+ years. The US was way ahead of us in Internet infrastructure: DSL broadband was widely available at home-user prices, at a time a when bottom-end 64K leased line would set you back £3k/year here. That gave US startups the environment in which to conquer the world, which is why the leading companies of that 1990s generation - Google, Amazon, etc - are all American.
This time the US is not ahead: it risks being third, behind (at worst) both Europe and Asia. "America First" Trump needed to Do Something. He's using the Huawei nonsense as weapon against the UK. Delaying 5G here radically reduces the chance of UK 2020 companies being the next generation of Googles or Amazons.
And it turns out, our Parliament is full of Fifth Columnists!
There may be potential security issues, though the US lobby has overblown them, but in general it's far more secure to use a mix of tech from diverse sources than to become totally dependent on one - which is where we are now going.
We've always had a diverse mix. Huawei was market leader, but never had the kind of market share that Cisco had a few years back. Let alone Microsoft, Google, Intel, etc at various times in recent history.
