The UK on Tuesday gave the green light to a limited role for Chinese telecom giant Huawei in the country’s 5G network, in a decision that left the US “disappointed” after it called for a total ban.
Even though London decided that “high-risk vendors” would be excluded from the UK’s “sensitive” core infrastructure, a US official said that there was “no safe option for untrusted vendors to control any part of a 5G network,” which offers almost instantaneous data transfer.
Washington has banned Huawei from the rollout of the fifth generation mobile network because of concerns that the firm could be under the control of Beijing, an allegation it strongly denies.
The announcement came as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepared to meet British Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week for talks in London likely to focus on Huawei and as the UK looks for a trade deal with Washington after Brexit.
The US had threatened to limit intelligence-sharing with London in the event of Huawei winning a UK role.
British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab told parliament: “Nothing in this review affects this country’s ability to share highly sensitive intelligence data over highly secured networks.”
“GCHQ [the UK’s cybersecurity agency] have categorically confirmed that how we construct our 5G and full-fiber public telecoms network has nothing to do with how we share classified data,” he said.
Johnson spoke to US President Donald Trump and “underlined the importance of like-minded countries working together to diversify the market and break the dominance of a small number of companies,” the British government said.
London’s decision — following a meeting of the British National Security Council chaired by Johnson — came shortly after Brussels said it would also allow Huawei a limited 5G role in the EU.
Brussels and London are both grappling to find a middle way to balance Huawei’s huge dominance in the 5G sector with security concerns, as they look to improve connectivity.
British Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Nicky Morgan said: “High-risk vendors never have been and never will be in our most sensitive networks.”
However, that failed to convince Washington, where a senior administration official said that the US was “disappointed by the UK’s decision.”
Meanwhile, research group GlobalData said a limited role for Huawei allowed “the UK to bow in part” to the US.
“A total ban would have required massive amounts of infrastructure to be torn out at eye-watering expense, and would have set the UK’s 5G rollout back by years. It was simply never a practical option to ban Huawei completely,” it said in a note.
Unlike the US, the UK has been using Huawei technology in its systems for the past 15 years.
Analysts Fitch said that the US could look to retaliate.
“The US has been putting a lot of pressure on its allies to ban Huawei, and failure to do so will raise questions about its strategy, as we expect it will look to retaliate, with threats to stop intelligence-sharing already made,” Fitch said.
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