After the American and Australian governments decided to exclude the Chinese company Huawei from building telecom networks in their countries, the company has now decided not to even offer to build 5G in New Zealand. The company states that the hassle doesn’t make it worth trying.
That’s what The New Zealand Herald reports today. Huawei has therefore decided to change its strategy with regard to 5G. Instead of trying to set up complete networks in other countries, Huawei is now only trying to sell its radio access network (RAN) components.
Chinese espionage
Huawei is currently facing a variety of accusations. American and Australian authorities claim that the company is building back doors into its networks, providing the Chinese government with the necessary spying opportunities. In addition, China would like to use Huawei to gain control over crucial parts of the infrastructure of Western governments.
That is why both Americans and Australians decided to ban Huawei from competing for lucrative 5G contracts. This now has consequences for the strategy pursued by the Chinese company. In New Zealand, it separates its core hardware – parts of the brain of a network – from the Ran hardware. The company hopes that in this way it will be able to gain a foothold in the worldwide roll-out of 5G networks.
More expensive components
Huawei thinks that by staying away from the 5G network cores, the safety argument may no longer apply. At the same time, it offers great price advantages, and hopes to convince customers of this for good. In any event, the Chinese company also claims that by being excluded from some 5G contracts, there is less competition on the market. That would result in higher prices for consumers.
Network provider Spark seems to be on the side of Huawei and states that the company offers good commercial value. Spark wants the New Zealand government to allow Huawei to bid on the 5G contracts. It states that its own safety tools can also prevent Chinese equipment from creating unacceptable risks.
Whether these risks really exist remains to be seen. For example, Huawei passed a test with flying colours in the United Kingdom to ensure that data was transferred safely. Yet the Americans are keen to prevent the Chinese from possibly spying on network equipment and are lobbying Canada, South Korea and other allies to prevent this from happening.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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