While the telecom sector are thrilled that the Trump administration has killed popular consumer protections like net neutrality, they're not quite as thrilled about a trade war with China. Reuters notes that the Trump administration is considering tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese imports, predominately focused on Chinese telecom goods. The goal, as it has been with the pressure on AT&T and Verizon to stop doing business with Huawei, is to protect U.S. companies from Chinese competition and China's tendency to skirt over and around international trade agreements.
But many of these same companies rely on Chinese hardware (or parts of hardware) for their own deployments, and are
wary of the higher consumer and business costs resulting from a new trade war.
"It’s unclear exactly how the possible action--which appears to still be in the planning stages and might not happen--could affect U.S. telecom companies," notes Fierce Wireless in response to the report. "However, if Trump does impose tariffs on telecom equipment from China, the action likely would raise the price of that telecom equipment for U.S. companies. Further, the action could spark a response from China--the world’s largest wireless market."
Both AT&T and Verizon earlier this year were pressured to scrap smartphone deals with Huawei due to vague "national security concerns." But an 18 month government investigation found no evidence that Huawei had spied on American citizens. What evidence that does exist tends to suggest that U.S. telecom companies like Intel and Cisco enjoy hyping the potential Chinese spying threat in order to prevent additional competition in the US networking gear and smartphone market, often disguising this protectionism under the umbrella of national security concerns.
And while China certainly does spy and engage in bad behavior (like most major powers), the breathless hysteria surrounding companies like Huawei tends to ignore the fact that Snowden documents revealed the United States was caught hacking into Huawei in a quest to install back doors in their products, and was also caught covertly intercepting Cisco shipments to install backdoors as well.
This "do what we say, not as we do" approach hasn't fared particularly well so far, and many trade experts don't believe additional tariffs are likely to help matters if the end result is a trade war that drives up costs for everybody in the telecom supply chain (all costs that will be passed on to you, the consumer).