‘France wants to ban Huawei equipment from 5g network by 2028’

French telecom companies would no longer be able to use Huawei equipment for the 5g network by 2028. French authorities would have said that to the companies. Due to this decision, carriers would be less inclined to use Huawei equipment for 5g.

When a telecom company in France wants to purchase 5g network equipment, it must obtain licenses for it from the French cybersecurity agency Anssi. Telecom companies can obtain licenses for three to eight years. Reuters writes that Anssi “ for the majority ” of the Huawai applications would only have issued licenses of three to five years. The majority of Ericsson and Nokia applications would again have licensed eight years, the medium said. When granting the Huawei licenses, it would also have been said that these licenses would no longer be renewed after their expiry.

This would mean that Huawei can be used in the French 5g network for a maximum of eight years. However, most of the equipment should be replaced in three or five years. In practice, this would ban Huawei equipment from the French 5g network by 2028.

Reuters relies on several anonymous sources for the article. Anssi and the providers would not like to comment on the story. One of the sources says that it would now be ‘difficult’ for a provider to purchase Huawei equipment, due to the relatively short duration of the licenses. As a result, the equipment would have to be replaced too quickly and it would not yield enough to choose the Huawei equipment.

The 5g licenses are also linked to the existing 4g equipment. As a result, a provider that now uses Huawei equipment for the 4G network, but wants to switch to Ericsson for the 5G network, would also have to replace the Huawei equipment for Ericsson devices, Reuters writes.

One source compares the situation in France with how it is regulated in the United Kingdom, ‘only government communication is different’. British carriers must have banned all Huawei equipment from the 5g network by 2027. This has to do with sanctions from the US government, which make it ‘impossible’ to guarantee the safety of Huawei equipment in the future. It is unclear whether Anssi thinks the same about the Huawei equipment.