It is the latest chapter in a long-standing face-off between Washington and the two companies over claims that their products contain Chinese spyware. The ban would cover their network infrastructure hardware and officially issued smartphones.
“Huawei is effectively an arm of the Chinese government and it’s more than capable of stealing information from US officials by hacking its devices,” claimed Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, one of the bill’s sponsors.
An effective ban on Huawei and ZTE was also proposed in a recently leaked White House policy document on the build-out of the US 5G cellular network.
It was quickly dismissed by the mobile comms industry for suggesting that the move could be achieved by having the government fund construction (and thereby choose all suppliers) rather than the industry.
However, two major carriers - AT&T and Verizon - are understood to have bowed to political pressure late last year not to offer subscribers Huawei’s latest...