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Technology

ennis Honrud’s family

D has been farming wheat

in eastern Montana for

three generations. Unashamed ly

old school, Honrud sows only

half his 6,000 acres, leaving the

rest fallow to avoid soil depletion.

“There’s not many of us left,”

he laments. Like many work-

ers in the global economy, the

68-year-old needs to stay con-

nected, in his case to monitor

crop prices and weather updates

from his green John Deere tractor.

So he asked a telecom provider

to put a cell tower in his backyard.

The Honrud property in Glasgow, Mont., is so But there’s a problem. Like around a quarter of
remote that it wasn’t well covered by any of the big the smaller “tier 3” carriers catering to rural areas
four American carriers—Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile like Glasgow, Nemont uses equipment provided by
and Sprint. So Honrud turned to the local provider, Huawei, the world’s biggest telecommunications-
Nemont Wireless, to install the tower. Today, cell equipment company. The Chinese firm generated
service is pretty good. When the occasional car ac- a mind-boggling $107 billion in revenue last year,
cident happens on the stretch of highway next to selling equipment to customers in 170 countries and
the Honrud farm, highway patrol officers no lon- regions around the world. It also may be the most BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN FOR TIME
ger need to drive a mile to get a signal. Now they controversial company in the world.
can place a call from the scene. If that hasn’t saved a Huawei has long been accused of rampant theft
life yet, “at some point in time it will,” Honrud says. of intellectual property (IP), selling U.S. tech to

32 Time June 3–10, 2019