Welcome to a weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough.

Not long ago I did a Long Reed's suggestion about Huawei and listener Dexter Tillian got in touch because he's

a telecoms analyst and he was actually quoted in the article I shared. Over email he started to educate me about some of my

misconceptions about Huawei and I was like dude don't just school me come on the

podcast and let's catch everyone up on

Huawei and its history and so today we do that where did Huawei come from how did it get to

a place where it's the preeminent 5G infrastructure firm.

Is Huawei just a tool of the Chinese government?

All of that answered and more.

I do apologize for the somewhat poor Skype connection

on this episode, but the content here is so good. You won't even notice, my

thanks to Dexter Tillion.

Let's just start by looking at where Huawei came from. They were founded all the way back in 1987. So this is way

before the modern telecom era that we're we're talking about today. and at that point China had no homegrown

telecoms technology or company or anything right? Yes that's right so there

were funny quite a while ago, so over 30 years ago, basically to be one of China's main

technological company at the time, but for a long time it didn't do much, especially on a global scale so it kind of did

routers a bit a bit what the Cisco used to do with a very very minor player.

It only really started I think in the early part of the 21st century,

so I knew 2000, where it became kind of an important,

not an important player straight away,

but a player in kind of the network manufacturing side so the network equipment side so mostly

...