According to Bloomberg News, the UK is reconsidering whether to let Huawei participate in the country's 5G construction. It is also reported that in order to meet Trump’s ban on Huawei, the British government is seeking reliable alternatives to replace Huawei’s antennas, routers and switches.

However, the report also pointed out that British operators are already using Huawei to build 5G networks. No other supplier, including Huawei’s European competitors Nokia and Ericsson, has difficulty filling this gap. Various data show that it is not easy for the UK to abandon Huawei for 5G.

35%

British intelligence officials worry that the Internet will be affected by espionage and threaten national security. Therefore, the government has formulated measures to strengthen the safety supervision of the four mobile network providers. The four network providers are EE under BT Group Plc, Vodafone, Three UK under CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. and O2 under Telefonica SA.

It is reported that these regulations will be submitted to Parliament for approval later this year. However, several lawmakers from Johnson's party countered that Huawei must be completely eliminated from the 5G network plan.

At present, Huawei equipment accounts for 35% of the UK's 4G network technology, and the proportion of BT using Huawei is more than half. Therefore, if the British government orders the complete abandonment of Huawei, it will impact the supply chain of these operators.

In addition, because the current technology of 4G network equipment is difficult to support applications such as mobile video, operators are eager to upgrade to 5G and use the same supplier-Huawei, which will help accelerate the introduction of technology.

2023

Since the launch of 5G services in the UK, most of the 5G antennas used by BT and Three Telecom have been supplied by Huawei. In addition, most of Vodafone's 5G network systems also use Huawei equipment. Therefore, Huawei's early advantages make the withdrawal more difficult and costly.

British security officials are concerned that Huawei’s system may be occupied by hackers or hostile countries. They are ensuring that Huawei’s equipment does not appear on the core network, which is the part of data collection, processing and redistribution. In addition, BT plans to shift the core of the EE network from Huawei to Ericsson by 2023.

However, US officials said that the core and non-core concepts are a gray area of ​​5G, and most of the data is processed in the periphery. In addition, Huawei has also participated in other sensitive projects, such as the development of security gateways for O2 networks. The personal data of some telecom engineers on LinkedIn shows that they are integrating Huawei's real-time payment system with the core of O2.

500 million

British Telecom (BT) pointed out in January that if the upper limit of Huawei's utilization ratio is set to 35%, it will cause the company to increase the cost of 500 million pounds (about 624 million US dollars).

In addition, a study by Mobile UK said that completely prohibiting Huawei from using 5G will cause these costs of the entire industry to increase exponentially, and expand procurement expenditures by curbing competition, thus effectively leaving Huawei's market share to Ericsson and Nokia.

Research institute Assembly estimates that if Huawei is banned, it will incur a cost of 4.5 billion to 6.8 billion pounds to the British economy, and will lead to a delay of 5G construction by at least 2 years.