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The United Kingdom prohibits Huawei from 5G networks, with complete exclusion by 2027.
The networking infrastructure of Huawei is to be phased out of the 5 G networks in the United Kingdom, the government announced today. Telecom operators will not be allowed to purchase new 5 G telecommunications equipment from the Chinese company from January next year, and they will have seven years to remove their existing technology from their 5 G infrastructure at an expected cost of GBP 2 billion. The announcement follows a recent study on Huawei 's position in the national infrastructure of the United Kingdom 's Regional Information Security Center.
The announcement represents a U-turn from the previous government stance declared in January, which allowed Huawei's hardware to be included in the country's 5 G network, with some restrictions.
In this scenario, Huawei will be limited to 35% of the market share and the hardware could not be used in central areas of the network or in geographically specific locations. Nevertheless, the infrastructure must now be entirely withdrawn from the 5 G network of the world.
UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Oliver Dowden warned that the decision "will delay our rollout of 5G." As part of the announcement, the government said that full fiber broadband operators would also be advised to move away from buying Huawei 's equipment.
In recent months, the British Government has been under increasing pressure, both domestically and internationally, to phase out the full use of Huawei's equipment. The demand was motivated by security experts' fear the Huawei 's equipment posed a national security danger by encouraging Beijing to spy on Western countries. Huawei has sternly denied these charges.
The international pressure came mainly from the United States. Huawei has been on the country's "entity list" since May 2019, meaning that US companies can not sell technology to the company. However, in May of this year, the New York Times reported that the US tightened its stance by announcing new sanctions against Huawei. Under the new measures which are due to come into force in September, Huawei and its suppliers, like the chip manufacturer TSMC, can not use American technology to design or manufacture Huawei 's products. At the time , U.S. officials described the move as "closing a void" in which Huawei may easily have used American technology in the past.
These new measures could have a significant impact on the products that Huawei is capable of producing, which critics argue could make its equipment less safe to use. The restrictions "will force the company to use untrusted technology that could increase the risk to the United Kingdom," according to a safety report leaked earlier this month.
For eg, the steps could impact Huawei's own HiSilicon chipsets. BBC News notes that the semiconductor industry depends on electronic design automation (EDA) tools to simplify the process of manufacturing new processors, such as Huawei's Kirin 990 5 G processor.
Sanctions, however, mean that this program can no longer be used in the design or development of Huawei's chips because major EDA developers have connections to the US.
It makes it impossible for Huawei to manufacture its own latest top-of-the-line processors, according to BBC News, driving it into third-party chips that, it was claimed, may be more impossible for UK information security officials to test.
Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is also under pressure from inside his own party.
The government suffered the largest setback in its current term back in March, when BBC News announced that 38 Conservative MEPs voted against the government in favour of an amendment pushing for an end to the usage of Huawei infrastructure in the country's 5 G networks by 2023.
Rising numbers of Conservative MEPs say that the facility poses a national security danger, possibly allowing Beijing to spy on the United Kingdom, according to the Financial Times. However if the government won the referendum, the event brought pressure on Johnson to take a stronger stance.
Responding to the report, a Huawei spokesperson called the decision "deceasing" and said that the company was "confident" that the current US sanctions would not impact "the stability or health of the goods we sell to the United Kingdom." He said that they were motivated by US trade policy rather than security and urged the British Government to rethink its decision.
News of a potential ban has proven controversial with telecommunications firms, many of which have already begun using Huawei 's hardware to set up their 5 G networks.
In remarks later released in The Guardian, BT Chief Executive Philip Jansen told BBC Radio 4 's Today program that it would be "impossible" to exclude Huawei completely from the country's telecommunications system within the next decade and that it will take five or seven years or eliminate it from the 5 G network. Jansen cautioned that pressuring Huawei 's hardware to be dismantled too quickly could pose health and security threats of its own.
