Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Nathan Simington said Chinese telecom giant Huawei turned America’s rural internet providers into “pain points” for national security, in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Congress mandated the removal of Huawei equipment from U.S. networks in 2019, but failed to fully fund the $4.98 billion effort until December. Simington said that gap left Chinese hardware — which he fears may be “phoning home” to Beijing — still embedded across rural infrastructure near sensitive military sites.

“You probably saw last week that we found undisclosed communications equipment in some Chinese-made solar panels,” Simington told the DCNF. “The solar panels have the ability to phone home just like E.T. … At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, what isn’t phoning home?”

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The “rip and replace” program was initially priced at $1.9 billion. Simington said the latest estimates are closer to $5.6 billion — a cost overrun that, he argues, proves “there’s nothing as expensive as a cheap product.” The victims, he said, were often rural telecom providers operating on razor-thin margins, lured by Huawei’s unbeatable pricing. The company didn’t immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

“Huawei had a great business … because the first hit is free,” the commissioner said. “Huawei will offer financing terms like 0% for 60 years. That’s a giveaway. Huawei doesn’t need to make profits in order to compete in the capital markets for investor capital the way that a normal company in the United States or elsewhere in the free world would.”

He said Huawei specifically targeted rural providers located near U.S. military installations, and added that if an American company had pulled the same stunt in China, “the executives would have found themselves in shallow graves.”

“I’m not proposing any kind of measures like that against Huawei,” Simington said. “But it’s really an intolerable situation.”

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