Recently, BT have come out in public and declared that they will no longer tolerate Huawei’s devices on their 3g and 4g network.
Huawei have long been suspected of being a faction of the Chinese Intelligence services . However, the company themselves have always strenuously denied the allegation, Their European website doesn’t really confirm or deny any direct links to the Chinese government. This assertion, of course, is hardly a surprise. If you’re in any way proficient with internet search engines, you can research this more and draw your own conclusions.
This recent hype, led to me see what I could see on Shodan related to Huawei and BT. Judging by the search, it seems to my uneducated eyes, that there is a proliferation of Huawei devices as part of the wider BT network. My understanding of the search, is that these are the older standalone modems which BT provided as part of their home broadband packages.
Digging a little deeper into the relationship between BT and Huawei and it appears that earlier in 2018 BT Openreach put a lot of their residential broadband eggs into the Huawei basket.
What does this “new” relationship mean ?
Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) broadband will put BT into direct competition with providers such as Virgin Media who have had FTTP for a long time where as BT have offered Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) then copper to the home for an equally long time.
Ultimately the BT version of the FTTP concept will be welcome competition against Virgin Media (and others) and will hopefully spark a price war in which the long suffering consumer “might” win with lower prices.
But wait – didn’t BT remove some of Huawei’s kit from their telephony network ?
Yes, they did. So isn’t it all a little contradictory that one part of BT is very concerned about the telephony equipment, yet another part of the organisation has Huawei firmly at the centre of their broadband connectivity ?
Extrapolating out from this, and fueling the paranoia, it’s entirely possible that there could be any number of backdoors into these Huawei devices which would enable PLA61398 to launch cyber attacks on demand with this zombie network of devices…
Just some food for thought for whenever BT come calling with their new broadband offer “Hey, we’ve got this great new fibre broadband”. It might just bring War Games into your living room….