It's been bubbling in the background for many years what damage they could do. The possibility of snooping goes back so far as about 2012.. which co-coincided with BTOpenreach's move to purchasing mostly ECI cabs during 2012-13.
Don't let it trigger a conspiracy theory as they have always used more than one supplier and back then ECI was considered advanced in some of the technology. For example although we had the concept of vectoring, ECI were the first and only manufacturer who at that time were making DSLAMs to support system based vectoring. Don't let the fact that ECI isn't much liked on these forums due to the farce with G.INP and the M41s cant do system based vectoring, 10 years ago ECI were considered highly respected by Europe SPs.
I guess we will never know for sure why BTOpenreach never upgraded to the V41's, it could have been a case of bad timing if they placed orders for 100's of M41's in 2011 when there wasnt yet hardware available, but should they have changed track and upgraded to V31's like one of the German SPs did. Should BT have been more aware of hardware due to hit the market in the coming months. Anyhow I digress, but I can certainly remember us discussing rumours of Huawei kit having the possibility to spy had been brought up and a matter of concern ~10 years ago. It all went quiet for a while BTOpenreach was using more ECIs and it was decided the DSLAMs were dumb and a moot point as Openreach weren't using them for any core equip for DSL It raised its head again after Trump got in power who wanted Boris to disallow Huawei practically anywhere in any of our networks. It mostly impacted the mobile network this time but based on the sane fears that originated a decade ago.
