Chinese telecoms firm Huawei will be banned from installing any new equipment to the UK’s 5G phone network from next 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.
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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.
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The National Security Council approved the change on Tuesday after intelligence officials warned that Donald Trump’s latest sanctions against Huawei made it impossible to retain its equipment without risks to national security.
The government believes that by the time of the next election in 2024 the UK will be on an irreversible path towards removing all the Chinese company’s kit from 5g infrastructure.
Following a bitter battle within his party, Boris Johnson announced in January that Huawei would be kept out of the sensitive core of the 5G network and limited to 35% market share of its other parts.
But Trump’s new sanctions imposed in May, which ban Huawei from buying all US semi computer chips, were viewed as a “game-changer”.
The result is that any new chips used by the company would be different from those previously deemed to be a manageable risk to the UK.
