A flurry of announcements in recent days has offered both good and bad news for the giant Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies, with a number of 5G deals being done, prevented or delayed.
For example, operator Telekom Malaysia and Huawei have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) which will see them collaborate on a variety of use cases ahead of the launch of commercial 5G services in Malaysia. Collaboration efforts will look at fixed wireless access (FWA), vehicles and smart cities. But, perhaps most importantly, there will also be exploration of future cooperation opportunities relating to the deployment of a fully-fledged 5G end-to-end system.
Meanwhile, in Turkey Huawei has helped operator Turk Telekom (TT) to record a peak data speed of above 2.9Gbps on a live 5G test network using 5G new radio carrier aggregation with two 100MHz bandwidth carriers at 3.5GHz.
Estonia, by contrast, is limiting the use of Huawei equipment in 5G rollout in the country after the governments of Estonia and the US signed an MoU which will restrict the use of Huawei equipment in Estonia’s 5G mobile core networks.
Huawei has responded by saying it is concerned about the declaration, as it also is about an Australian decision, implemented in 2018, effectively banning it from participating in 5G rollouts. The US and Japan have taken similar action, citing security concerns. A number of European countries, including Germany and Norway, have not implemented a ban.
The UK government, however, has chosen to sit on the fence for now, saying that the decision on whether Huawei has a place in the UK digital economy will be delayed until after the forthcoming election on 12 December.
