The biggest reason why the US government has not got its way in trying to get all its allies to bar Huawei and ZTE from 5G contracts is operator hostility. MNOs resist anything that would reduce their supplier choices – and therefore price and feature competition – even further. Competition in large-scale network equipment has been steadily eroded by a wave of vendor consolidation, but the growth of the Chinese suppliers has brought both huge R&D investments and affordable solutions to the mix. Anti-Huawei activists argue that barring the Chinese companies would actually open up opportunities for newer or smaller suppliers – many of them American – to achieve scale and so drive more, not less, choice. They have seized…