Since Donald Trump assumed the office of US President in 2016, the administration and all of its functionaries has had an obsession with China, and in particular winning the 5G race at all costs. But what exactly does that mean? STAN BEER explains.
It certainly cannot mean winning the 5G networking equipment race because the US doesn’t have a player in that 5G race like Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia or Samsung.
5G Race
Perhaps it means winning the 5G network deployment race? Well no, not that either.
T-Mobile boasts wide coverage with its low-band 600 Mhz 5G network, but with speeds that are only a marginal improvement on 4G LTE, and still has much work to do adding faster performing 2.5 GHz mid-band sites as the second layer of its self-titled layer-cake approach.
As for Verizon and AT&T, they have barely got their 5G networks off the ground.
Meanwhile, China, through its three wireless operators, has blanketed entire cities such as Shenzen and Shanghai with mid-band 5G coverage and download speeds in excess of 300Mbps.
In the 5G handset space, the US, thanks to Apple, is definitely a player with, arguably, the best product on the market.
But the iPhone 12 is a premium priced product range and therefore is destined to have a sizeable but not dominant market share like the combined array of Android handsets, which include Samsung and the better known Chinese brands, such as Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo and others.
The US does dominate the handset software market with iOS and Android and that has been the case for the past decade, well before the advent of 5G.
And the US does indeed dominate in the 5G components space, with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Skyworks, and Qorvo.
And herein lies the problem for the US.
All of the above companies sell a bucketload of their components to Chinese 5G network equipment providers like Huawei and ZTE, as well as 5G handset makers.
In the eyes of the Trump administration, winning the 5G race is synonymous with forcing to Chinese to lose.
“We want them to do well but just not as well as us,” is one of Trump’s famous (or infamous) quotes, depending on which way you look at it.
Thus, the US has launched an all out war on the key Chinese 5G tech players, focusing on Huawei in particular, as well as its local rival ZTE.
The war on Huawei and ZTE has been waged on the spurious grounds that these Chinese companies not only pose a security threat to the integrity of US 5G systems, but also to that of its major allies.
The rationale behind this claim is that all these companies are under the control of the central government of China and thus the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore are not to be trusted.
But if this is true, then it must have also been true decades ago when Huawei was going hammer and tong establishing itself as the world’s leading telecommunications equipment provider.
The US had no problem with Huawei back in the 4G days but with the advent of 5G and the substantial lead that China holds in that space, the US sees itself being overtaken as the world’s pre-eminent economy.
Thus, the onward march of Chinese leadership in the 5G space must be stopped at all costs.
The problem is of course that there has been a symbiotic relationship between American and Chinese in the tech industry.
Huawei was well on its way to becoming the leading smartphone handset vendor in the world when the US Government banned US tech companies from doing business with the Chinese telecoms company.
That meant that not only was the supply of chips to Huawei banned from semiconductor companies but also the commercial versions of Android as well as key Google applications such as the Play Store, Maps, Gmail and so on.
Huawei was thus forced to use the open source version of Android and scramble around for alternative suppliers of chipsets and, as a result, its handset business plummeted.
But so too did the businesses of many US semiconductor companies, many of which were none too pleased at the state of affairs.
Recently, the US has lifted restrictions on the supply of technology to Huawei, provided the technology does not support the Chinese company’s 5G business.
And therein lies the issue. The US bans on Huawei and fellow Chinese company ZTE have absolutely nothing to do with national security, despite the latest utterances from FCC chairman Ajit Pai.
The US bans are all about curtailing the leadership of China in the 5G market.
If the US is really concerned about Chinese wireless technology being a threat to national security, why has it allowed its companies to continue doing business with Oppo, Vivo, Realme, Xiaomi and other Chinese handset makers?
Donald Trump is a businessman first and President second and in essence the US bans on Huawei and ZTE, as well as the wider US initiated trade war with China, are purely business decisions.
However, using foreign policy in attempt to win a 5G race that has already been won, especially when it hurts your own country’s companies, appears to be bad business.
