The recent global networking major, Cisco’s sad revenue forecast shows that opening of the Pandora’s box with NSA scandal is having a similar evil effect as being experienced by Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei for its alleged connections with the Chinese Military over the past many years and spanning multiple geographies. This is a tale of how global politics influences the future of networking industry stakeholders.
Well, it is not the only factor, but Cisco has emphasized that the backlash over U.S. geo-political surveillance has definitely hit orders in China. Additionally, countries such as Russia, Brazil are also putting question mark on usage of Cisco’s networking products and NSA is being cited as a possible factor.
As a matter of fact, Cisco’s challenge in China may further strengthen because of its longstanding rivalry with Shenzen, China based Huawei Technologies, which on a similar turf has faced stiff political opposition towards selling its networking equipment and buying companies in the U.S. telecom market, on the premise of its alleged close alliance with the Chinese army. Huawei has been denying this, quite vehemently, though.
For a number of technology and networking experts in the market, this has not come as a big surprise as communications infrastructure is regarded as one of the biggest key to the surveillance scandal.
It may be recalled that in the month of June, 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that NSA had hacked network backbones, at a global level in order to gain access to sensitive information.
Snowden’s revelations have reverberated in other big emerging markets such as Brazil, Mexico and even in India. When it comes to the Indian government key telecom infrastructure, there has been a lot of hue and cry over the government’s decision not to implement Chinese telecom equipment at the core, there is no such reservation towards Cisco at the moment.
However, proponents of India’s local manufacturing dreams do reverberate reasons to encourage installation of locally produced telecom equipment and put a cap on global MNCs making it more secure and better managed at the core level.
“Whether it is because of US based NSA or Chinese Military, countries like Russia, Brazil, or even Australia have a certain set of self protectionist policies which will be very helpful towards securing their local networks as well as encourage local manufacturing. India should move in the same direction. At the moment we are not supporting local manufacturing here and simply dependent on big multi nationals such as Cisco, IBM or Huawei,” explains a high ranking official from a telecom association on conditions of anonymity.
As networking involves routing and switching of voice, data and video, it is surely one of the most critical assets of the population of any nation. Just a mere thought of imagining some agency or group of individuals tapping on to the critical information makes it a very difficult proposition. And that is why networking industry has been and is going to be very closely monitored and controlled by geo-political scenarios in future.
