Vodafone has weighed in on whether the UK government should ban Huawei 5G equipment from national networks.
About one third of Vodafone’s UK base stations currently use Huawei equipment. A government ban on the Chinese vendor’s gear would require Vodafone to replace that equipment across a substantial portion of its network.
Speaking to Reuters, Vodafone UK CTO Scott Petty explained:
“If we were forced to remove Huawei from the network, we would need to go to the 32 percent of base stations that are currently using Huawei for radio and replace all of those with somebody else’s technology and then deploy 5G on top of that.”
There is also a significant financial impact.
“The cost of doing that runs into the hundreds of millions and would dramatically affect our 5G business case; we would have to slow down the deployment of 5G very significantly.”
Concerns about Huawei stem largely from the US position that the Chinese government may exert influence over companies headquartered in China, raising the risk that network equipment could be used for state surveillance. The emergence of 5G—bringing more connected devices and critical services—has heightened scrutiny compared with previous generations of mobile technology.
Huawei denies any state control over its operations. The company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, has acknowledged that Huawei has a Communist Party committee, noting that Chinese law requires companies operating in China to establish such committees.
Mitigating Risks
Vodafone UK says it took steps more than five years ago to limit Chinese equipment to lower-risk parts of its network, according to Petty. The wider Vodafone Group announced in January that it would stop buying Huawei 5G core equipment in Europe.
Last month, the head of the National Cyber Security Centre said the UK could manage security risks—similar to past efforts—through the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and that there was no public evidence of malicious activity by the vendor to date.
However, in the same period the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a long-established independent think tank on international defence and security, warned that allowing Huawei to participate in 5G deployment would be “naive” and “irresponsible.”
This excerpt from the RUSI report highlights their concern:
“It is far easier to place a hidden backdoor inside a system than it is to find one. In the likely, but unacknowledged, battle between Chinese cyber attackers and the UK’s Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, the advantage and overwhelming resources lie with the former.”
“The 2013 Intelligence and Security Committee report on Huawei’s participation in the current generation of telecommunications was scathing. Among other criticisms, it pointed out that GCHQ could not be confident in finding insertions embedded in software containing over a million lines of code (or more, given frequent software updates), which would enable covert downloading of information.”
Huawei executives have countered that compromising security would be catastrophic for their business and argue the company would not knowingly facilitate espionage.
Separately, Huawei is challenging restrictions elsewhere: the company has filed a lawsuit against the United States over its 5G ban, and its CFO, Meng Wanzhou, has pursued legal action in Canada relating to her arrest on allegations tied to sanctions violations.
The UK government is expected to publish a review of the telecoms supply chain in the coming months. That report will play a key role in determining the future of Huawei equipment in Britain’s networks.
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