The current hulla-bulla about the security concerns in the Chinese telecom equipments has garnered a large media space. The Chinese vendors operate all over the world and have great working relationship with majority of operators all over the world. And the things seemed to be looking great for them as they supply cost effective and innovative equipments. In fact, their equipments are much cheaper than the equipments offered by the vendors from the other countries but equally as good as those provided by the other international vendors.
But the story about Huawei’s equipment having spyware in them brought back the focus to national security concerns and again the Chinese equipment vendors seemed to have hit the brake in terms of acquiring more orders.
But currently even the operators are supporting the Chinese telecom equipment providers as they offer great products and that too at lower prices.
It is clear to everybody that the lowering of the tariffs in the Indian telecom market has been possible due to these lower priced but extremely efficient equipments from the vendors like ZTE.
The murmurs in the industry are that there is a large lobby that is feeling the threat from the Chinese vendors and hence wants to keep them at bay. The Chinese equipment vendors have captured a big chunk of the Indian telecom market share within a short period of time, and are even challenging the market leaders in the domains and areas where they have reigned supreme for ages. For example, ZTE came to India around 10 years back and within that time span the company is counted among the top 5 in the Indian telecom arena.
The Chinese vendors are asking the government to treat them at par with the other vendors in the market. For example, ZTE which is a listed company and openly share information with the stakeholders are requested to go through and comply with all the stringent security measures and tests that the government officials set up. In fact they are working with operators in 140 countries and none of them are complaining about any security concerns.
In this era of globalization, it would be wrong to treat any company from any country differently. In fact any listed open that share its internal information openly and which is willing to comply with any security tests and meet any stringent policy and guidelines should be given a chance to prove and perform.
