Huawei filed a legal petition against the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) move to bar rural U.S. operators from using equipment from the China-based vendor because of national security concerns.

The company filed the petition in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit asking that a recently passed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order be declared unlawful. The Fifth Circuit includes Texas, where Huawei has its U.S. headquarters.

Huawei argues in its claim that the FCC order fails to offer the vendor “due process protections in labeling Huawei a national security threat.”

“Banning a company like Huawei, just because we started in China – this does not solve cybersecurity challenges,” Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer Song Liuping said at a press conference this week.

Song stated that the FCC did not present any evidence showing that Huawei was a security threat and “ignored the facts and objections raised by Huawei and rural carriers after the FCC first made the proposal in March, 2018.”

“Huawei also submitted 21 rounds of detailed comments, explaining how the order will harm people and businesses in remote areas. The FCC ignored them all,” Song said, according to a statement.

The FCC last month enacted an order that forbids any company from using the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) to purchase equipment or services from companies that pose a national security threat. Huawei and its fellow China-based telecom vendor ZTE have been repeatedly accused of close ties to the Chinese government and criminality, but Huawei, the market leader, has born the brunt of those attacks of late.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai addressed the ongoing security concerns during an on-stage interview at the MWC Los Angeles event in October. “There are larger issues involved here but from our perspective at least, we want to make sure that we do everything we can to preserve the security of those networks from the domestic perspective,” he said.

The FCC’s USF program is a taxpayer-funded $8.5 billion annual fund that was first established in 1997 to promote universal access to telecommunications services. Most of the money is allocated to carriers that provide coverage in rural or otherwise underserved areas of the country.

The FCC and some members of Congress are also working on separate tracks to draft guidelines for the removal and replacement of Huawei and ZTE gear from U.S. networks, including funding that could help alleviate the burden placed on the smaller and regional carriers that use their equipment. Huawei and ZTE have been instrumental for a number of smaller operators in upgrading their networks.

A bipartisan U.S. House panel has unveiled legislation that would authorize $1 billion in funding for small and rural operators to replace equipment from Huawei and ZTE. Meanwhile, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks initiated a study into the matter and concluded that ripping out and replacing the gear could cost $70,000 to $130,000 per cell site. Total estimated costs range from “hundreds of millions of dollars to over a billion,” according to the report.

The U.S. government’s case against China-based vendors dates back to at least early last year when reports surfaced about the government looking at building a national 5G network. Those efforts were based on fears that China has achieved a dominant position in the manufacture and operation of network infrastructure.

Huawei’s troubles are also impacting other countries.

German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom told Reuters that it has stopped signing any new 5G contracts with any vendors as the German government debates whether to bar Huawei from that country’s 5G network builds.

“In light of the unclear political situation, we are not currently entering into any 5G contracts – with any vendor,” Deutsche Telekom said in response to a request for comment from Reuters. “We are currently informing vendors of this.”

Germany has for months wavered on its decision as to whether to ban Huawei from participating in those contracts. The country in October appeared to pull away from banning any vendor from 5G network construction despite attempts by the U.S. government to force such a ban.

German operators Vodafone Germany and Deutsche Telekom both recently launched 5G networks in that country using Huawei equipment even before the new guidelines were formalized by German regulators.

The European Commission (EC) and most of its European Union (EU) member states in October published a coordinated risk assessment report on 5G network security. That report stated that 5G networks could pose a greater cybersecurity risk than past technologies due to the greater use of software to control functions and edge networking components to serve more use cases.

“With 5G networks increasingly based on software, risks related to major security flaws, such as those deriving from poor software development processes within suppliers are gaining in importance,” the report states. “They could also make it easier for threat actors to maliciously insert backdoors into products and make them harder to detect.”

Photo: Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer Song Liuping (Courtesy of Huawei)