December 05, 2018
BT to cut Huawei out of the mobile mix
BT has confirmed it will be stripping Huawei equipment from its core 4G network, while it will also face a ban from any DWDM optical transport network and mobile edge compute rollout.
With the UK spending so much time and money creating a department in GCHQ to specifically monitor the business, making sure there are no nefarious activities, it might have thought it was safe on the isle. This assumption can no longer be held.
Reports initially emerged in the FT, though these have now been confirmed by BT spokespeople, that Huawei will be banned from any sensitive work. A point which should be made is BT has chosen not to work with Huawei for a considerable number of years, though with the EE acquisition it inherited Chinese equipment.
“In 2016, following the acquisition of EE, we began a process to remove Huawei equipment from the core of our 3G and 4G mobile networks, as part of network architecture principles in place since 2006,” BT said in a statement to our sister site Light Reading.
Huawei has been responsible for at least a 30% probably as high as 45% reduction in CAPEX costs for operators globally
Given the activity by governments in Canada, USA Australia and now UK we expect the trend to continue
It will mean higher CAPEX costs for operators and will accelerate price increases for LTE and 5G
BT to cut Huawei out of the mobile mix
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