Rural Carriers Nervously Await Funding to Ditch Huawei
With only a handful of days to go in 2020’s legislative session, rural telecom carriers are hoping Congress delivers the estimated $1.5 billion needed to remove the gear from China’s Huawei and ZTE still present in the networks of at least a few dozen of them. The Federal Communications Commission has already cut off access to telecom subsidies for small carriers using such equipment, which is deemed a threat to US national security. One likely potential source of this cash: Capitol Hill’s forthcoming package to fund the government beyond Dec. 11.