This month Huawei filed a complaint against Spain’s rural 5G contracting process, because the tender made it too risky for bidders to include the Shenzhen, China telecom giant’s hardware. The filing is the company’s latest move in its long, involuntary departure from Europe and other global telecom network markets.

Huawei holds a strong, global market-leading position in telecom network hardware, says Stéphane Téral, founder and chief analyst of Téral Research in San Francisco. However, he adds Ericsson and Nokia have in recent years made “competitive hardware in a timely manner” such that they should be up to the challenge of replacing Huawei networks wherever there’s demand. 

Huawei and ZTE, the other major Chinese-headquartered telecom supplier, are stuck between a law and a hard place. Two, actually: the equipment manufacturers are subject to a pair of laws that, if enforced, could require them to comply with security-related instructions from the Chinese government. On the other hand, other countries are writing more and more restrictive language into their telecom and security regulations that restrict suppliers subject to such explicit pressure from third countries—which effectively means China.

AS SKIERS SCHUSSED AND SWERVED in a snow park outside Beijing during the 2022 Winter Olympics, a few may have noticed a string of towers along the way. Did they know that those towers were collecting wavelengths across the spectrum and scouring the data for signs of suspicious movement? Did they care that they were the involuntary subjects of an Internet of Things–based experiment in border surveillance?

This summer, at the Paris Olympic Games, security officials will perform a much bigger experiment in the heart of the City of Light, covering the events, the entire Olympic village, and the connecting roads and rails. It will proceed under a temporary law allowing automated surveillance systems to detect “predetermined events” of the sort that might lead to terrorist attacks.