There is a contradiction at the heart of today’s government decision to allow UK telecoms companies to purchase kit from China’s Huawei for their 5G and full-fibre broadband networks.
It is that Huawei has been officially designated as a ‘high-risk vendor’ – because it is seen by ministers as subject to direction by an anti-democratic Chinese government and its surveillance apparatus.
But – despite pressure from President Donald Trump for Huawei to be banned altogether from the UK’s digital infrastructure – Boris Johnson and the National Security Council have not chosen to instruct Huawei to pack up their hi-tech kit and flog it in other parts of the globe.
Instead, they decided to give Huawei restricted access to the new 5G and super-fast broadband networks – which Johnson felt obliged to do, because he is convinced that banning Huawei would have set back the development of 5G and super-fast broadband by two to three years, at a potential economic cost of tens of billions of pounds (or so officials informed him).
But Huawei will not be allowed to install any kit in the so-called core of these networks, which is where most data is processed and important functions such as encryption of messages takes place.
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