Just read a really nice article in the WIRED magazine about the inventor of the "Polar Codes", Erdal Arikan and Huawei.. they spend an equal amount of time praising Erdal Arikan and dissing Huawei...
First they talk about how Erdal invented the "Polar Codes". His obsession with the Shannon limit in Information Theory. This is the technical upper limit on how much information you can pack in a channel, factoring in the noise and redundancy. It was a very hard problem and even his mentor in MIT came close to a solution and gives up. Erdal goes back to Turkey and helps set up the engineering college in a University - Bilkent, which he heads. This helps him to work on this problem over 20 years, while other people in US have to work on small problems for the sake of tenure.
Simultaneously, they talk about Huawei's rise through the support of the Chinese Government and by stealing intellectual property. Apparently, Huawei screws Nortel, and when Nortel has to file for Bankruptcy, Huawei takes over their research team. It is the Chinese born head of the Nortel team who identifies Erdal's polar codes and starts working on them.
Now, even if one company develops the technology, the standards have to be agreed by a lot of companies, the governing body is called 3GPP. Huawei has a lot of leverage there, because it holds most of patents and it has been able to push the Polar Codes based technology. US doesn't even have an equivalent company - Europe has Ericsson, Japan has a few. And all the Chinese companies are working together in pushing the Polar Codes based standard including ZTE and Lenovo. They've succeeded :)
Now to claim legitimacy, Huawei is honoring the inventor Erdal - They start the article by saying the ceremony and settings were corny and cold-war style :)
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