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    Trump stumbles as smartphone-obsessed America falls far behind in the race to roll out 5G networks

    Dana Kennedy, DCReport @ RawStory
    January 08, 2020

    Thanks for your support!

    This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

    President Donald Trump during “chopper talk” on the South Lawn of the White House as he departed for Florida (screengrab)

    This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

    Dana Kennedy, DCReport @ RawStory

    “Should I get a Huawei phone?”


    That’s what friends in New York City, where ads heralding 5G are popping up all over, have asked me more than once. Apple, biding its time, has yet to release an iPhone with 5G.

    If the customers are tech heads with money to burn for a new toy, you could say yes. Better to say no.

    But here’s the real answer: It’s not about the phone.

    It’s more about how a social media and smartphone-obsessed America may be dropping the ball when it comes to controlling the nascent 5G revolution. China’s Huawei wants to dominate 5G on a global scale.

    It doesn’t help that we have a president more interested in making deals than in protecting U.S. security or encouraging innovation … and who doesn’t understand the basics of 5G.

    As part of his ongoing trade war with China, Trump has made Huawei into the Voldemort of telecoms.

    The average person knows about Huawei because, as part of his ongoing trade war with China, Trump has made it into the Voldemort of telecoms. He’s blacklisting the company ostensibly because it could spy on us and has lobbied U.S. allies not to use its equipment when building their next-generation 5G wireless networks.

    Huawei’s also a threat to what Trump called a “race we must win” and a “race we will win” in an awkward April speech about the U.S. rollout of 5G that sounded as if he were reading an old script from “The Jetsons.”

    U.S. Way Behind on 5G

    America’s actual chances of winning that race? Said FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, quoting a recent U.S military report on 5G:  “The country that owns 5G will own innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world and that country is currently not likely to be the United States.”

    Huawei, established in 1987 when all Chinese telecommunication technology had been imported from abroad, is considered a threat to national security because of close ties to the Chinese government. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Huawei’s increasing global dominance was subsidized by $75 billion in state support.

    Huawei has a hot new flagship phone with 5G capability. Yes, and this after starting to make handsets just five years ago.

    But where the massive Chinese company really beats us, for now, involves the key infrastructure like routers, servers and cell phone towers that will power the Internet of Things and smart factories. 5G has been hyped as the wireless magic that will enable everything from driverless cars to remote surgery.

    World's Largest Equipment Maker

    Huawei is the largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment in the world and is second only to Samsung in owning the most 5G essential patents. The United States has strong companies like Cisco and Qualcomm (which arguably owns some of the best quality 5G patents) but we are behind when it comes to the most critical components of 5G technology.

    We lack suppliers for the main switching networks for 5G, so European companies like Nokia and Ericsson will have to build them.

    “The U.S. has a big hole when it comes to American-made infrastructure for 5G and it puts us at a real disadvantage,” Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, told DCReport.

    “But I don’t think Trump even understands it. Remember when he went to that Apple factory in Texas this fall and said Apple is going to make the 5G network happen. Hello dude! Apple makes phones that connect to the network. They’ve got nothing to do with making the network!”

    Google Shut Out

    You can still shell out for the cool new Huawei Mate 30 Pro—one reviewer called it “the incredible phone you won’t buy.” But because the Trump administration has forced U.S. companies like Google to cut off Huawei, it won’t have the pre-installed Google apps like YouTube and Chrome.

    Huawei’s taken a big hit here and around the world as a result of the sanctions and issued a lengthy rebuttal to claims that it’s both dangerous spyware and cheap.

    The company, however, is resilient. The company’s top executive in India, Charles Peng, recently announced a rollout next year of replacements for Google’s app suite (GMS) with its own HMS, or Huawei Media Services. On Dec. 30, the Indian government allowed Huawei to participate in trials for 5G networks, Reuters reported.

    Even though 5G will show up as simply faster wireless networks for the next two years, watching foreign powers vault past America is a bitter pill for a country that pretty much invented modern telecommunications.

    Some perspective: Samuel Morse’s first telegraph line was installed in 1844 with the first transcontinental telegraph line laid in 1861. China didn’t get a telegraph line until 1877 and it was only six miles long.

    Bell Telephone was founded in 1877 and by 1910 there were more than 6 million telephones in America 

    Rapid Growth in China

    In contrast, China had only 7,000 phone subscribers in 1910. All were in Beijing and owned only by the very rich who got the technology from the West, according to Eric Harwit, a professor at the University of Hawaii and author of “China’s Telecommunications Revolution.”

    When Harwit was an exchange student in Beijing in 1982, “No one had a phone in their house,” he said. Harwit had to go to the Ministry of Communications when he wanted to call his parents back here.

    Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental phone call from the storied American Telephone & Telegraph building in downtown Manhattan (it now houses Nobu restaurant) to San Francisco in 1915.

    Bell could never have imagined that more than a century later, the Chinese would—within two decades—leapfrog past landlines and claim the fastest deployment of telecommunications technology in the world.

    “If you’d told me even in 1982 that China would have more mobile phone subscribers and Internet users that any other country it would just not compute,” Harwit said. “They were lagging behind for so long. Now it’s the opposite. I’m just not sure banning them is the way for the U.S. to go. We’re a free market. Instead we should start focusing on what we can bring to 5G.”

    The question for the moment, then, is not whether to get a 5G phone—but rather, can the U.S. get 5G?

    This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

    Enjoy good journalism?

    … then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has slashed advertising rates, and we need your help. Like you, we here at Raw Story believe in the power of progressive journalism. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we've expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and legal efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. And unlike other news outlets, we’ve decided to make our original content free. But we need your support to do what we do.

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    Value Raw Story?

    … then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has slashed advertising rates, and we need your help. Like you, we believe in the power of progressive journalism — and we’re investing in investigative reporting as other publications give it the ax. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we've expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. We need your support to do what we do.

    Raw Story is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Invest with us in the future. Make a one-time contribution to Raw Story Investigates, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you.

    Report typos and corrections to: corrections@rawstory.com.
    READ COMMENTS - JOIN THE DISCUSSION

    Should Trump be allowed back on social media?

    'No Labels' organization in turmoil after hiring disgraced reporter Mark Halperin

    Bob Brigham
    April 22, 2021

    A political organization co-chaired by former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is in turmoil after a controversial hiring decision.

    "A nonpartisan political organization is facing blowback from its employees after hiring journalist Mark Halperin, whose career as a prominent TV pundit hit a wall after he faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment.

    Junior staffers at No Labels objected this week when the organization hired Halperin, co-author of the best-selling campaign chronicle "Game Change." The internal dissension grew so heated that two employees who complained were granted paid leave — to consider whether they want to stay, the organization said — and a third is considering resigning over it," The Washington Post reported Thursday.

    "Halperin's career as a political analyst collapsed at the start of the MeToo era in 2017 after at least a dozen women, including former colleagues, came forward with allegations against him ranging from unwanted touching to sexual assault. Since then he has taken small steps back into public life. He wrote a book about the 2020 presidential election, started a newsletter, and began turning up as a commentator on relatively low-profile radio and TV outlets such as Newsmax," the newspaper reported. "Earlier this week, No Labels hired him as a consultant for an unspecified project. But the move didn't sit well with some of No Label's employees, most of whom are young women."

    "No Labels's co-executive directors Margaret White and Liz Morrison defended Halperin's hiring in public statements this week. But Morrison later acknowledged that "two employees accepted our offer to take paid time off to think about what they wanted to do" in the wake of discussions about Halperin," the newspaper reported.

    Mark Halperin's hiring by a political group draws protests from (its mostly female) staffers. From ⁦@farhip⁩ and me… https://t.co/Z3MWEp4393
    — Sarah Ellison (@Sarah Ellison)1619135858.0

    Trump’s 'depression' predictions flopped — and now the GOP is scrambling to find an economic message

    Matthew Chapman
    April 22, 2021

    On Thursday, writing for The Washington Post, David Lynch noted that former President Donald Trump's dire predictions that "you will have a depression the likes of which you've never seen" if Joe Biden is elected, but the economy is soaring — and Republicans are struggling to adapt their economic message to the new reality.

    "The rebounding economy is headed for its best year since 1984, according to the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. economy likely expanded in the first quarter at an annual rate of 6 percent and should accelerate in the months ahead, economist Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics told clients this week. More than 1.3 million jobs have been added since the election," wrote Lynch. "By Trump's preferred metric — the stock market — Biden is outperforming his predecessor at this stage of his presidency. Last summer, the Republican said stock values would 'collapse' under Biden. But through Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average was up nearly 16 percent since Nov. 7, when the Democrat was declared the apparent election winner, compared with a 10.5 percent gain over a similar period following Trump's election."

    The result is that Republicans are scrambling to come up with a new message to counter Biden's popularity.

    "Republicans have lashed Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan as unnecessary given the economy's emerging strength and as being poorly designed, because some of the direct payments will go to households earning as much as $150,000 annually," wrote Lynch. "But so far, none of the attacks have drawn much support beyond the GOP base. A Gallup poll last month found that 63 percent of Americans backed the Biden plan."

    All of this bodes poorly for the GOP, noted Lynch, because parties that run against an administration presiding over economic growth tend to do poorly — as did the recently deceased Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984.

    "The economy grew that year at an annual rate of 7.2 percent, its best performance since the Korean War. Republican advertising boasted of 'morning again in America,' and Democrats responded with an unpopular prescription for a tax increase to address the federal budget deficit that Reagan had used to fuel his boom," noted Lynch. "The Democrat lost 49 states that year."

    You can read more here.

    Equestrian Federation bans man for using electric spurs -- he can't even watch from the bleachers

    AFP
    April 22, 2021

    US showjumper Andrew Kocher was banned for 10 years by the International Equestrian Federation on Thursday for using electric spurs on horses, the US federation "unequivocally" supporting the punishment.

    The FEI had opened an investigation of Kocher last June after an allegation that he had used spurs that delivered an electric shock was reported to the independent Equestrian Community Integrity Unit (ECIU).

    "It was alleged that Mr Kocher had used electric spurs on a number of FEI registered and national horses in international and national events, and during training," the international federation said in a statement.

    Formal disciplinary proceedings were launched in October, when Kocher was provisionally suspended.

    His term of suspension is therefore deemed to have started on October 28, 2020 and will run through October 27, 2030.

    Kocher was also disqualified from eight events between June 2018 and November 2019, fined 10,000 Swiss Francs and ordered to pay costs of 7,500 Swiss Francs.

    During his suspension, Kocher is barred from participating in or attending, in any capacity, including as a spectator, any competition or event that is authorized or organized by the FEI or any national federation.

    "The United States Equestrian Federation (USEF) unequivocally supports the decision of the FEI Tribunal to suspend athlete Andrew Kocher for 10 years and disqualify his results from eight events between June 2018 and November 2019 for the use of electric spurs," the US federation said in a statement.

    USEF jumping Chef d'Equipe Robert Ridland added: "The US Jumping Team does not tolerate any form of cheating or horse abuse and fully stands behind the outcome of the FEI Tribunal decision.

    "Horses are our willing and trusted partners in sport and deserve our ultimate care and respect in the pursuit of excellence."

    Kocher, who has denied using electric shock devices on his horses, has 21 days to appeal the sanction.

     
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