I can assure you it is not paranoia. Many a company has failed...

I can assure you it is not paranoia. Many a company has failed to install equipment because of backdoors into the equipment. The backdoors are created to allow diagnostics, remote management, debugging, firmware upgrades etc. A number of backdoors have been identified in Telco equipment which would allow spying modules to be added without the knowledge of the Telco or government.
As you can understand governments and Telco's dont like this sort of thing especially when the companies are controlled by the Chinese Government.
This sort of thing has been happening for decades