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At a pre-Mobile World Congress (MWC) kick-off in London, Chinese networking supplier Huawei doubled down on the strength of its huge R&D operation in the face of growing criticism in the West for its alleged links to the Chinese intelligence services, and brushed off its competitors’ claims about their 5G readiness. In response to remarks made by Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm earlier this week, when he said Ericsson was essentially ready to deploy 5G for its customers at scale today, Ryan Ding, Huawei’s carrier business group president, said: “If you are asking about how big our 5G lead is – you can ask our customers. I think our customers will be able to say that for 5G, Huawei is very far ahead of our competition. “I firmly believe that all our competitors now have usable 5G base stations. However, usable is different from good. “I strongly encourage you to compare our products to the competition in terms of power consumption, performance, weight, size, deliverability and maintainability.” Huawei claims to have won more than 30 ...