networkn: Sorry, I read your comment to mean you thought China would be toast. I agree with the logic that Huawei would lose all credibilty and struggle to remain in the market.

I know China wouldn't care, but that being said if some provable espionage was occurring from state sponsored actors in China against a Telco it would add fuel to the fire and everyone would go "ah ha there you have it the Chinese can't be trusted" so it would have huge ramifications on their whole tech sector.

The other part of this whole argument which I wonder about is the ability to exfiltrate the data without being noticed. Anything that would really be useful would require a LOT of packet capturing and then shuffling that back to the mothership which granted in this age of 100GB links would be doable.

The only way I would see it working is to have the data plane constantly listening for a "magic packet" being initiated over the internet or a magic IMEI and then talking back to the command and control to extract the data out over the radio or the internet. But that would take storage and dedicated hardware just to inject traffic for the data plane. That would be much harder if not impossible to detect but could work for targeted attacks.

However that assumes that the equipment isn't dismantled before installation and questions don't get asked about what it is all doing.

I still think a malicious government funded actor within the organisation is a far more likely scenario than a particular back-door in the equipment.