Reuters quoted “two people with knowledge of the matter” telling the agency that a meeting of senior civil servants took the step at a meeting yesterday.
Huawei insisted that the agency’s sources “are not Huawei people” and told Capacity it was “not in a position to comment on this and will wait for a formal decision”.
Reuters said the UK’s National Security Council will meet next week “to decide how to deploy Huawei equipment”.
It’s been clear for at least a year that the UK will insist the country’s four operators – BT’s EE, CK Hutchison’s Three, Telefónica’s O2, and Vodafone – must keep Huawei equipment well away from the core of their 5G networks.
However, some experts have insisted that it is hard in the 5G world to make a clear demarcation between the edge and the core. Malcolm Turnbull, former prime minister of Australia, which has banned Huawei outright, last week insisted: “It isn’t possible to separate the core of the network from the edge,” he said. With a virtualised network “a lot of the processing is at the edge of the network”, he said in an interview.
If the Reuters report is right, the UK government must be ready to expect strong opposition from the US, which – like Australia – has strongly opposed the use of Huawei or its Chinese rival, ZTE.
However such a pro-Huawei decision is likely to be welcomed in Canada, France, Germany and possibly New Zealand, where operators have favoured the vendor’s equipment to be used alongside that of its Scandinavian rivals, Ericsson and Nokia.
