Dish Should Think Twice Before Accusing Softbank of Dubious Chinese Ties in Their Rivalry for Sprint

As we’ve already reported, Dish Network has been trying to discredit Japan’s Softbank, its rival bidder for US wireless provider Sprint Nextel. Dish says Softbank’s use of equipment made by Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE in Japan could imperil US national security, even though Softbank has already pledged not to use such equipment in the US.

Dish’s stance is pretty ironic given that US company Clearwire, which Sprint partly owns and is trying to fully acquire, already uses Huawei equipment. While Softbank has promised to pay $1 billion to remove it, Dish has taken that as another opportunity to smear Softbank’s bid, saying in a May 23 statement that Softbank’s removal plan merely “confirm[s] the serious national security risks” of its proposed acquisition. To add to the irony, Dish declines to say what it would do with the Huawei equipment if its bid were to win.

The icing on the cake, though, is that Dish too once worked with a Chinese company with dubious security credentials—a government-run military and aerospace outfit called China Great Wall Industry Corp (GWIC). In 1995, Dish leased a satellite called EchoStar1 to US company EchoStar, which used a GWIC rocket in its launch (at the time, EchoStar and Dish belonged to the same company).

Read more at Quartz.