10:45 AM -- The list of countries where Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has been denied the chance to compete for business has grown again, with Germany the latest market to give the vendor further cause for concern.

Having already experienced the political cold shoulder in Australia, India and the U.S., Huawei has now been excluded from bidding for business at a major German research network where it was an incumbent supplier. (See Huawei Ban Row Escalates, US Blocks Huawei LTE Bid , Global Vendors Face Tough New Rules in India and More Security Woes for Huawei.)

Deutsches Forschungsnetz (DFN), Germany's national research and education network that stretches about 10,000 kilometers to connect about 60 sites, is to upgrade its network from 10 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s using technology only from European suppliers, according to Wirtschafts Woche and several other German media outlets.

Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks and T-Systems International GmbH have been shortlisted for the upgrade.

Chinese vendors are not being considered, it seems, because of security concerns, even though the current DFN network has been using Huawei equipment since 2005.

Lewis Xu, the CEO of Huawei Germany, expressed incredulity at the decision in a statement issued to the German press, saying that to exclude Huawei from the process is incomprehensible.

What must be more worrying for Huawei is that concern about cyber security is increasing and that many companies and national agencies point the finger at China as a prime source of political and industrial espionage attacks. (See Nortel Got Super-Hacked and this Bloomberg report, for example.)

It's hard to imagine that Huawei and other Chinese vendors, no matter how many existing national deployments and words of support they have, are going to find anything other than increasing resistance and further restrictions when it comes to their involvement in the construction of important national networks in the near term.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading