UK Government to Ban New Huawei 5G Equipment Starting September 2021

The UK’s big play against Huawei all comes to a head next September.

According to a new Bloomberg report, UK mobile operators will be banned from installing Huawei 5G equipment in their networks from September 2021 as part of wide-ranging measures against “High Risk Vendors.”

On Monday, Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said the British operators “must stop installing any Huawei equipment”v from September next year — an earlier date than had been expected.

In July, the government announced it was banning Huawei equipment from the UK’s 5G network, with a deadline of 2027 for removing it. The decision is a reversal of an announcement made in January, in which the country said Huawei would have its market share capped at 35 percent and its equipment wouldn’t be allowed in core parts of the network.

The decision is part of the government’s road map for the complete removal of high-risk vendor equipment from the UK’s 5G networks, alongside a new $333 million USD strategy to diversify the telecoms market with plans for a National Telecoms Lab and trials with Japanese telecom firm NEC.

The new roadmap comes as the UK parliament prepares to review a new telecoms security bill that aims to provide the government with “unprecedented” powers to force telecoms giants to stick to strict security rules, which include the management of high-risk vendors like Huawei.

If the bill is passed, it would effectively enshrine the Huawei ban into UK law, and provide the government with legal tools to enforce the roadmap it has proposed to remove high-risk vendors from the country’s infrastructure.

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