Thank you for your important article "Power Shifts East" (America's Network, July), and for your commitment to a continuing focus on this vitally important subject. The telecom industry is a strategic U.S. industry, and in a converged voice-data-video world, the telecom equipment industry is strategic too. Although the citizenship of an equipment vendor's equity owners does not necessarily determine the security and privacy of its products, a vendor's owners and board of directors are an important indicator of what equipment buyers and U.S. policymakers should be concerned about.
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It is no secret that metadata about telecom traffic, as well as the telecom packets themselves, are vitally important from a national security standpoint. As homeland security extends beyond military and intelligence agencies to engage state and local government and the critical infrastructure sectors, the nation's homeland and national security interests are even more exposed to non-military and non-intelligence networks, and the equipment decisions made by network equipment purchasers.
Carriers, information service providers and other buyers of telecom and networking equipment should worry that their choices of infrastructure equipment will become limited by Chinese dominance of the industry, and that the networks with which they interconnect will not be secure and trusted. Buyers should also recognize that network security—upon which their network's value stands or falls—is not assured by implementing traditional operational best practices: the equipment vendor has a hand in network security that may not be disclosed or known or serve the interests of the purchaser, its customers or broader national interests.
Chinese dominance of the telecom equipment industry has potentially profound implications for North America and the West.
DENNIS KELLY
PROJECT EXECUTIVE,
PEGASUS TECHNOLOGY CONSORTIUM
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI
GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
Your Power Shifts East article portrays a situation that is both scary and reassuring. It's scary in that China could take significant market share from Cisco by competing with a pricing structure that Cisco cannot match. Reasons include undervalued currency, and lack of government regulation and employee retirement packages. It's reassuring because as China becomes more integrated into the world community, the country is less likely to nuke its customers
JIM MASSEL
REGIONAL DIRECTOR
BUSINESS SMARTMOVES
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
WATCHING SOFTWARE
A good article. We are in the OSS space and haven't really seen much in the way of competition there despite the fact that many Chinese nationals are involved in software development.
CURTIS M. BEGLEY
VICE PRESIDENT SALES
TELUTION INC.
CHICAGO