UK Culture and Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden confirmed on Tuesday that the country will ban Chinese telecom giant Huawei from its mobile networks, a significant policy reversal that will have a major impact on both UK telecommunications and its relations with China and the US.
Addressing the House of Commons, Dowden announced that mobile network operators will be barred from buying equipment from Huawei by December 31 2020, and all of Huawei’s kit that is already present in their infrastructure must be stripped out by 2027.
The existing ban on the use of Huawei’s equipment in “core” parts of the UK’s 5G network will naturally remain in force.
“By the time of the next election we will have implemented in law an irreversible path for the complete removal of Huawei equipment from our 5G networks,” Dowden said in his statement to Parliament.
The decision follows the implementation of US sanctions against Huawei in May, which blocked the company from using microchips from American suppliers. A subsequent review by the National Cyber Security Centre found that Huawei’s equipment could not be considered “safe” if it were made to rely on non-US components.
Tuesday’s announcement also represents a compromise with mobile providers BT and Vodafone, who have warned of potential phone “outages” if they were forced to remove Huawei’s equipment from their infrastructure on a rushed timetable.
Ed Brewster, a Huawei spokesperson, said of the new policy: “This disappointing decision is bad news for anyone in the UK with a mobile phone. It threatens to move Britain into the digital slow lane, push up bills and deepen the digital divide.”
