British Telecom Operator Warns: Do Not Go Too Fast on Banning Huawei
BT CEO Philip Jansen urged the British government on Monday
not to move too fast to ban China's Huawei from the 5G network, cautioning that
there could be outages and even security issues if it did. Prime Minister Boris
Johnson is due to decide this week whether to impose tougher restrictions on
Huawei, after intense pressure from the United States to ban the Chinese
telecoms behemoth from Western 5G networks.
Johnson in January defied President Donald Trump and granted
Huawei a limited role in the 5G network, but the perception that China did not
tell the whole truth over the coronavirus crisis and a row over Hong Kong has
changed the mood in London.
"If you are to try not to have Huawei at all, ideally
we would want seven years and we could probably do it in five," Jansen
told BBC radio.
Asked what the risks would be if telecoms operators were
told to do it in less than five years, Jansen said: "We need to make sure
that any change of direction does not lead to more risk in the short
term."
"If we get to a situation where things need to go very,
very fast, then you are into a situation where potentially service for 24
million BT Group mobile customers is put into question - outages," he
said.
In what some have compared to the Cold War antagonism with
the Soviet Union, the United States is worried that 5G dominance is a milestone
towards Chinese technological supremacy that could define the geopolitics of
the 21st century.
The United States says Huawei is an agent of the Chinese
Communist State and cannot be trusted.
Huawei, the world's biggest producer of telecoms equipment,
has said the United States wants to frustrate its growth because no US company
could offer the same range of technology at a competitive price.
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