Mexican officials questioned the US's repeated obstruction of Mexico's use of Huawei

According to a report by British media on May 13, in order to break the long-term monopoly of telecommunications giants, the Mexican government launched a "shared network". This is the largest communication infrastructure project in Mexico in the past 10 years, allowing foreign suppliers to participate in the construction, including Chinese communication giant Huawei.

But before the "shared network" was officially launched, the US government repeatedly expressed to Mexico its concerns about Huawei's participation in the project (especially in the US-Mexico border area), of course, citing their usual "security risks". However, this statement by the US was once directly questioned by Mexico.

According to a Reuters report on May 9, as Mexico's telecommunications industry has long been monopolized by giants, the government promoted the introduction of market competition from 2013 to 2014 to comprehensively reform the telecommunications industry, and "shared network" is an important part of it.

   Altan Networks, the developer of the "shared network", announced that the "most delicate work" in the project, including the "core" of the system and sites near the Mexico-US border, will be done by Nokia, while Huawei will be responsible for related work in southern and central Mexico.

      According to the report, two people familiar with the matter revealed that the above decision has taken into account Huawei's so-called "political sensitivity." As early as 2016, the US State Department held two meetings with the Mexican Ministry of Communications and Transportation to express concerns about Huawei's possible participation in the above project.

      According to a former senior U.S. State Department official who spoke to Reuters, the U.S. State Department met with the Mexican Ministry of Communications and Transportation twice in 2016 to express concerns about Huawei's possible involvement in the project. The former official said that while the U.S. did not ask Mexico to ban Huawei, it did warn Mexican officials of the "security risks" Huawei could pose.

      The former official recalled that some Mexican officials questioned why the United States was so worried since AT&T, a U.S. company, was cooperating with Huawei in Mexico. It is understood that from 2014 to 2015, AT&T removed Huawei's equipment from the "sensitive parts" of its Mexican network after acquiring two local Mexican communications companies. However, according to two sources, AT&T still uses Huawei's equipment in Mexico, partly because of Huawei's "deep qualifications and rapid execution."

      Reuters reported that while the sites along the U.S. border remain with Nokia, Huawei has been working on three sites in northern Mexico. The three cities are in northern Mexico but not near the border. In a statement, Altan said its decision to divide the work between Nokia and Huawei in this way was "based solely on technical and economic optimization criteria."

Huawei reportedly began offering services in Mexico as early as the 1990s, and eventually won a large market, supplying almost all major telecom companies, including Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim's America Movil.

According to the report, executives in Mexico's telecommunications industry stressed that Huawei's northward expansion in the "shared network" highlights that the Chinese company combines speed, manpower and mature technology. Marco Galvan, senior director of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), said that the vast majority of Mexican operators are still keen to use Huawei's equipment. "Huawei brought as many necessary resources as possible from China to Mexico. They did what they should do."