Thursday, December 5th, 2013
SEOUL, KOREA - The leaders of two U.S. Senate committees have raised objections over news reports that China's Huawei Technologies Co. had been chosen to build a nationwide LTE network for Korea's LG U+.
This is the first time for the world's second-largest telecom equipment maker to supply wireless telecom equipment to Korean telecom service providers.
According to the Financial Times on December 3, Democratic Senators Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the reports raised concerns in light of the close security alliance between the United States and Korea. "Maintaining the integrity of telecommunications infrastructure is critical to the operational effectiveness of this important security alliance," they said in a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry, and James Clapper, President Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence.
The latest letter underscores how closely related the telecom industry has become with concerns about security and how much concerned the U.S. government is about the possibility of the Chinese government to wiretap phone conversations or messages and the global telecom equipment industry to be taken over by Chinese suppliers.