With its fierce 40-megapixel camera, Huawei’s £900 flagship P30 is a big beast on the mobile market.
But while these handsets will remain safely on sale in Britain, our path to nationwide super-speed mobile 5G was today dealt a major blow after the government announced it was ditching the Chinese telecoms hardware giant.
Now begins the engineering headache of extracting Huawei’s infrastructural kit inside our fledgling 5G network by 2027.
But BT boss Philip Jansen warned stripping it out of the digital infrastructure could take up to a decade.
While equipment is also available from Nokia and Ericsson, ditching Huawei will mean Britain’s rollout of 5G, launched last summer, is also delayed by up to three years.
The government U-turn, sparked by US sanctions, comes with a — current — bill estimate of up to £2 billion.
However, the seven-year removal period will likely please BT, Vodafone and Three, who feared being told to remove their Huawei kit much faster.
After New Year’s Eve, it will also be illegal for operators to buy any 5G equipment from the company in a move described by some as Cold War-style tit-for-tat, and marking a deep freeze in the Cameron government’s “golden era” of economic ties with China.
Although not Huawei was not allowed into the core of UK’s early 5G networks - which deal with data traffic, billing and subscriber information - or near to nuclear and military sites, removal of the equipment will be a labour-intensive task, including ripping out tens of thousands of roadside cabinets, plus transmitter masts and equipment in local exchanges connected by spaghettis of cables.
Home and office internet providers such as BT’s Openreach division have also been advised to “transition away” from using Huawei in fixed-line fibre broadband within two years.
Furthermore, questions will now be raised over Huawei’s involvement in UK university campuses, notably Imperial College, which in May announced a £5 million deal to provide on-campus 5G.
The ban will add to Beijing's anger with Britain, already furious over Downing Street's decision to accept three million Hong Kong refugees, but play well with President Trump as the UK seeks post-Brexit trade.
The government chose Huawei to supercharge our mobile networks in readiness for innovations such as driverless cars and smart cities, but amid all the spying fears and political horse-trading, Britain has been left buffering and with a hefty bill.
