French authorities have told telecoms operators planning to buy Huawei 5G equipment that they won't be able to renew licences for the gear once they expire, effectively phasing the Chinese firm out of mobile networks, three sources close to the matter said…France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI said this month it would allow operators to use equipment, including Huawei's, under licences of three to eight years. But it added it was urging telcos not currently using the Chinese company's gear to avoid switching to it.
(Rthk.hk English News, July 23)
Gareth Owen's key takeaways – options for operators:
- This follows last week’s UK announcements that all MNOs will have to cease procuring 5G equipment from Huawei after 2020 and will have to replace all Huawei 5G equipment by end-2027.
- With most MNOs in Europe using Huawei equipment for at least part of their 5G networks, the alternative options will be Nordic incumbents Ericsson and Nokia, or challenger Samsung Networks.
- Samsung is dominant in South Korea and has several deployments in the US, but is not a major player in Europe as it does not support legacy 2G/3G – resulting in lack of support for so-called ‘single RAN’ solutions.
- To overcome this, Samsung is proposing a 5G overlay network solution connected to 4G, and the company claims many European MNOs are removing their ‘single RAN’ requirements. The problem is these solutions need a lot of spectrum, which many European operators lack.
- We believe that this will act as a catalyst in the UK for open RAN, which basically sub-divides the RAN into separate units, thus enabling new players to offer just parts of the RAN rather than an end-to-end solution.
- However, open RAN is still an immature technology and will not be suitable for dense urban areas for several years.
- Nevertheless, the vendor diversity issue will act as a catalyst for open RAN research and eventual adoption across Europe and elsewhere.