Trump’s fight with Huawei could threaten internet access in rural areas

In swaths of rural America, along roads where there are just a few farms or homes within a mile-long stretch, customers are so few that the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile don’t bother to build cell towers for coverage. The only operators providing wireless access are small carriers, many of which can’t afford equipment from suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia and instead rely on cheaper network infrastructure from Huawei Technologies and other Chinese companies. Rural broadband carriers could be forced to rip out and replace entire networks because they wouldn’t be able to import spare parts or software updates to maintain infrastructure, said Roger Entner, a telecom analyst at Recon Analytics. “If something breaks, what are you going to tell your customer? ‘I’m sorry you have an outage. We don’t know when we are going to fix it because it’s Huawei equipment. Until then, sorry. No internet for you,’ ” Entner said. “You don’t want to tell that to a customer.”

“Small carriers face a constant uphill battle both in terms of limited vendors who will supply to us … compounded by the regulatory challenges we’re up against,” said John Nettles, president of Pine Belt Communications, a small telecommunications company in Alabama that relies on the Chinese company ZTE for its 4G network. “Sometimes it feels like the cards are really stacked against us.” Nettles estimates that replacing Pine Belt’s network would cost $5 million to $10 million. And downtime from installing new equipment would probably cause Pine Belt to forgo $1 million to $3 million in roaming fees.