Chinese Mobile Giant Huawei To Be Stripped Out Of UK 5G By 2027
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Chinese telecoms firm Huawei will be banned from installing any new equipment to the UK’s 5G phone network from the end of this year and have all its kit stripped out by 2027, the government has announced.
Just six months after Boris Johnson granted a limited role for the company in Britain, culture secretary Oliver Dowden confirmed a U-turn that will mean a two-year delay to the expected full rollout of the next generation mobile technology.
Under a new Telecom Security Bill it will be illegal for any company in the UK to install any new Huawei equipment after December 31 this year. Its existing kit will have to be fully removed by 2027.
The current rollout date for UK 5G, scheduled for 2025, will be delayed at a cost of “hundreds of millions of pounds”, Dowden told MPs in a Commons statement.
Tory MPs may fear that the seven years given to fully strip out the Chinese company is too long, but it is understood that the sheer complexity of the system means it is impossible to do so sooner without blackout risks for consumers.
Dowden said that “disruption and blackouts..was one of the reasons for the timetable we have set out”. “Put bluntly, the shorter the timetable for the removal the higher the risk of that happening,” he said.
There may be controversy too over a separate decision to give UK telecoms firms a full two years to continue stockpiling and using Huawei technology for full-fibre broadband.
With Nokia the only other infrastructure provider for broadband in the British marketplace, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) advised that a delay was needed to allow a switch away from Huawei.
Ian Levy, the agency’s technical director, said in a blog: “We think that Huawei products that are adapted to cope with the [sanctions] are likely to suffer more security and reliability problems because of the massive engineering...
