The Government of Saskatchewan is not happy with Ottawa’s decision to ban Huawei from 5G networks in Canada, despite already having barred the Chinese company from provincial telecom operator SaskTel’s 5G network some two years ago — reports 650 CKOM.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government last week announced a ban on Huawei (and ZTE) equipment in Canadian 5G networks after years of deliberation. However, the feds didn’t stop there. The prohibition also extends to the country’s 4G networks, and that complicates SaskTel’s plans.
“The thing that they tucked into this was we must also stop using the existing 4G equipment even though there’s never been a risk — it’s a fundamentally different product,” Don Morgan, the minister responsible for SaskTel, said on Wednesday.
“Now it puts SaskTel in a very difficult and rather cumbersome position of how they go ahead with the 5G rollout.”
Morgan said he tried to talk to the federal government about Huawei and 5G years ago when SaskTel was mapping out its 5G rollout, but he never received a definitive response. The province eventually decided against incorporating Huawei equipment on its own, choosing to go with Samsung tech instead.
However, SaskTel’s 4G network is a different story and uses Huawei gear. The operator now has until December 2027 to decommission and remove all Huawei equipment from its 4G network. The same goes for Bell and Telus as well.
Morgan noted that the equipment will have started to enter the end of its useful life by that time anyway, but the government’s decision speeds up both the timeline and the $200 million replacement cost. The ban also makes it so the gear can’t be redeployed to underserved areas.
“Now we’re not able to take any of the equipment (and) redeploy it elsewhere in remote areas or anything. It’s the fact that they’ve added this on and I don’t believe they’ve done that anywhere else in the world except for in Canada,” said the minister.
That is less than ideal, considering 4G won’t be anywhere near obsolete by 2027 and telcos will have to keep 4G networks around and maintained for a good few years after.
According to Morgan, the provincial government is frustrated and angry with the federal government over the 4G caveat.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said on Tuesday that the delay in Ottawa’s decision to ban Huawei from 5G networks was unrelated to China’s previous detainment of Canadian journalists Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, and was instead a result of political and technological challenges associated with the move.
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You shouldn’t have installed it in the first place. Now stop whining and get that spy hardware off of Canadian towers and equipment.
👍
slap a samsung sticker on there
Correct me if I am wrong, but this is not new news about the ban. So Bell, Telus, and Sasktel are all using equipment that have potential to be ban years ago and never care to change. I guess Rogers is the smart one here this time.
Bell and Telus began rolling out 4G equipment over a decade ago. I don’t think anybody was thinking about the possibility of a ban back then. The world was a very different place. Both avoided Chinese equipment like the plague when they began their 5G rollouts three years ago, partnering with Ericsson and Nokia instead.
Rogers dealt with Ericsson for more pragmatic business reasons, but it also has to do with Rogers being a GSM carrier from the beginning, which was entirely Ericsson’s playground in the early days. Bell and Telus switched from CDMA to 3G for the 2010 Olympics, but even that was intended to be temporary, as 4G was already on the table at that point.
That reminds me when I was in Vancouver back in 2010 for the Olympics. Suddenly Bell and Telus were both starting to offer GSM phones to everyone at huge discount price. In a way, Rogers was either lucky or forward thinking going with GSM in the first place.
I wonder how much it would cost and how long would it take for Bell, Telus, and Sasktel to switch all those equipment out. It’s not simply just switching hardware only. I bet some of the software that run it wouldn’t be compatible either.
Exactly. Telecom equipment has traditionally been some of the most proprietary kit out there. Once you make a deal with one vendor, you’re pretty much stuck using that vendor’s hardware and software for the rest of your network’s existence.
The rollout of 5G provided some opportunities for that to change, but ultimately the real hope is in the O-RAN (Open RAN) Alliance, which aims to make sure that everything in the 5G world is interoperable, and even virtualizable (vRAN) so you can run 5G systems software on off-the-shelf servers instead of specialized networking gear. Interestingly, Huawei is one of the few major vendors that hasn’t joined the O-RAN Alliance, so any network operator in their right mind should stay away from Huawei’s stuff anyway.
One interesting thing that I was told by my friend who is a Network Engineer. Huawei’s software alone was years ahead from Ericsson’s software when he was doing 5G Network training few year ago. He said it’s like Huawei was using Windows and Ericsson was using DOS. Not sure if Ericsson has improved the GUI or not recently.
As for GSM vs CDMA, it may have been a bit of both, but in those days it was largely seen as a VHS-vs-Beta kind of battle. In the late nineties, either had the ability to emerge as the victor, but the bulk of the world ultimately went GSM, with CDMA only existing on a few carriers in North America (Bell, Telus, Verizon, and Sprint), along with Japan and China.
U.S. carriers never really moved away from CDMA — they just built their 4G/LTE networks on top of that. The only reason Bell and Telus made the switch was that they didn’t want to give up all those sweet roaming fees to Rogers as thousands of international visitors flooded Vancouver with their 3G phones.
Technically speaking, though, Bell and Telus never built a GSM network. Rather, they based their new 3G networks on UMTS/HSPA (which was the evolution of the 2G GSM EDGE technology), rather than the CDMA -> CDMA2000 EVDO upgrade that would have been the more obvious transition.
However, customers with iPhones on Bell or Telus in those days had no 2G network to fall back to — you either had a “3G’ in your signal bar, or no signal at all. Customers on Rogers could fall back to EDGE (“E”). Needless to say, the original 2007 iPhone didn’t work on Bell or Telus either, as it was 2G device.
I believe beyond roaming fees, which was a huge reason, TELUS and Bell also built the network for compatibility. Canada just wasn’t large enough for OEMs to build handsets for the Canadian deployment of CDMA specifically, so we only got Verizon & Sprint handsets. And at that time we were still several years until Apple released a CDMA iPhone, and Bell and TELUS saw just how many people were flocking to Rogers for the iPhone. So yeah roaming fees a little, but handset compatibility was probably the largest reason.
True. The roaming fees ultimately justified the decision from a financial point of view, and sped things up. The writing was definitely on the wall — an insider told me back in those days that Bell had a potential late 2010/early 2011 UMTS rollout on its roadmap; the Olympics affected the timing of it more than anything else.
Ironically, Verizon stubbornly stuck to CDMA to the point where Apple released a CDMA iPhone just for Verizon customers. Of course, Verizon had eight times the customer base (12 million subscribers on Bell vs 94 million on Verizon).
Rogers bought Fido (called Microcell initially) who was the first NA GSM operator if memory serves. Kind of a lucky (or smart) bet on the prevailing technology.
Oh great! Another excuse for the cell phone carriers to keep their rates high…
Wow this is a huge problem, because I believe the majority of Bell / Telus current network is in fact Huawei.
Their 4G network, yes. However, Bell and Telus saw the writing on the wall and went with Ericsson and Nokia for their 5G rollouts.
On the other hand, Rogers has had a partnership with Ericsson for years, so most of its 4G equipment (and even 3G equipment) isn’t affected.
To build on what Jesse said, 5G also requires compatible 4G equipment to be installed because LTE and NR work together for NSA network deployments (which is the primary deployment in the world for now). So as Bell and TELUS have built out 5G, they have been ripping out Huawei LTE gear and replacing it with gear compatible with their new 5G network. This is one of the reasons that Rogers rolled out 5G so much quicker at the start. So frankly, the governments decision has been a moot point for quite some time as the big providers don’t really use Huawei gear anymore anyways.
That “minor” technical argument didn’t stop Bhell and Thellus to cry for a handful of billions in compensation 😂