The UK’s 5G decision: the art of balancing politics and technology

The last week of January 2020 was in all respects a momentous one in the UK. Not only did Brexit become official last night with plenty of celebrations among those who supported it, but our government also made a very big decision regarding the role of ‘high-risk vendors’ such as Huawei and ZTE.

There has been much commentary on the decision, a lot of it focused on what it means for the UK-US relationship, given the strong lobbying from the US administration to swing the decision from Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In the decision making, I am sure there were two lines of thought – one political, the other technical. On the technical front, I think there are enough experts involved to ensure that we understand the risks and how to mitigate them. On the various parliamentary committees there were technologists, university professors, and network operators contributing to the evidence. I wrote about the outcome of some of their deliberations here, Huawei in UK 5G: It’s Ethics and Politics.

There was plenty of oversight and guidance from the National Cyber Security Centre, and this week its’ director Ian Levy put out a broad set of documents and narrative immediately following the Prime Minister’s decision.

I commented on some of the aspects of it in my article in EE Times, UK Press on with 5G & Huawei, But Place a Cap on Traffic, Equipment, including aspects of the 35% cap, which to me is just saying, “OK, there are three main equipment providers (Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia), let’s just do a rough division between three of them”. It looks that way, even if there might have been some technical assessment. You can also hear my podcast interview with EE Times editor Junko Yoshida in the weekly EE Times On Air podcast. I explain what I understood about the 35% cap, and how it might be enforced. (There’s also a story about me almost getting on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One to talk about it, but then the Northern Rail news broke so I was ‘stood down’).

There are of course many other aspects to the story, and I wanted to highlight a few that I thought were good analyses of the background and also some context from other media outlets.

Nic Fildes and James Kynge wrote in their article in the Financial Times that the appeal of Huawei in the UK is primarily commercial. “UK telecoms operators such as BT and Vodafone already rely on the Chinese company for much of the current 4G infrastructure. EE, which is owned by BT, has used Huawei for two-thirds of its 4G radio equipment and Vodafone uses the Chinese company’s kit for most of the country outside London, according to industry executives.”

They added, “Crucially, 5G technology uses existing 4G equipment as its base, meaning that Huawei enjoys an entrenched position. Declining to use it for 5G would mean replacing the Huawei 4G equipment that is currently installed, at considerable cost to the telecoms operators, something neither the UK nor the operators can easily afford.” The article goes on to highlight the potential cost to BT of around £500m over the next five years to strip out the excess Huawei equipment in its network to meet the cap.

Then there is a good article by Rupert Goodwins in The Register that points out bigger picture context: there are already so many Chinese components already in our pockets, so why fret about 5G, he asks.

Goodwins puts it well here: “Yet the same is true of any Chinese company. How much Middle Kingdom technology is in your pocket right now? Your home router? Laptop? Your enterprise infrastructure won't have a Chinese name on the front panels, but the chips inside? The stuff's ubiquitous. There's not much point in locking down whatever core network carries the UK's top secrets if the people using it all have smart TVs in their rooms busy relaying everything they hear back to Beijing.”

I think that’s the whole point. The technology is everywhere, whether it’s Chinese, American or European. The supply chains are global, and we are all highly integrated into them, making it difficult to really separate each country’s chips and hardware. The UK decision on 5G was clearly an attempt to overcome the politics with a pragmatic approach.

You can listen to my contribution to EE Times on Air here.