US ISP to rip out Huawei equipment

Huawei's bad luck in the US continues, after wireless ISP Clearwire announced it will reduce the amount of equipment from the Chinese telco vendor it uses in its TDD-LTE network rollout due to national security concerns.

Clearwire chief technical officer John Saw said Huawei currently represents less than five per cent of the ISP's total spend on LTE, according to FierceWireless.

Clearwire will reduce the Huawei footprint "materially", Saw said, with Clearwire part owner Sprint Nextel reportedly asked to spend US$1 billion on removing Huawei equipment from its network by US officials.

Huawei chief executive Ren Zhengfei said in a rare interview with media earlier this month the company was "no longer selling our telecom equipment to telecom carriers in the US" due to ongoing concerns around security, linked to the company's alleged ties with the Chinese government.

"If for example the United States continues to say 'we still have this security problem', that may prove in hindsight that the decision may not be very fact based," Zhengfei said.

Locally, Huawei's business is booming, with revenue for 2012 up by almost two-thirds to $368 million, the company announced yesterday.

In Australia, Huawei has worked with most major telcos and ISPs, including Optus, Vodafone, Telstra, iiNet, TPG, AAPT and more, the company said in its 2012 annual report. But it has been banned by the Australian Government from tendering for the national broadband network over the same security concerns.

The company has also won several large contracts in New Zealand, including to deploy a 4G LTE network for incumbent Telecom and another to supply fibre-optic equipment to Chorus, as part of the country's billion-dolllar Ultra-Fast Broadband NBN project.

Globally, Huawei raked in US$35.35 billion last year.