Yesterday I put on my telecoms hat 👒 to film a new episode of @trtworldnow’s Roundtable on the EU looking to ban “high risk” Chinese telecoms equipment vendors from European mobile networks as part of revisions to the EU’s Cybersecurity Act with Enda Brady, China Chamber of Commerce to the EU’s Linlin Liang and Checkpoint’s Graeme Stewart 🔐
I actually started out as a telecoms reporter in 19 years ago, and although I cover more than 30 tech beats, so many of them lead back to telecoms that it’s really important to keep an eye on it.
Here are some key points I made:
📌 The telecoms industry is very unhappy about these new rules.
📌 The promise of 5G has not been realised as they thought it were due to the pandemic and the global economic crisis, so mobile operators are not keen to rip out existing Chinese tech and replace it with Nokia or Ericsson kit that costs between 20-40% more.
📌 On top of this, to this day there is zero evidence that one vendor’s telecoms equipment, in the middle of a mobile operator’s network, can be used to hack contagiously across the network to send data back to China.
The statement issued by the GSMA, the global representative body of mobile operators even hints at this.
📌 Mobile operators & equipment providers Nokia and Ericsson have been lobbying governments since the pandemic asking them to put more investment into their 5G networks to enable the technological advancements that are currently not possible today. Currently, we really only have basically 4G+… a slightly faster mobile internet speed than 4G.
📌 The former EU commissioner Thierry Breton was a telecoms executive so the mobile operators had hoped the EU would help them towards funding the upcoming innovation of 6G (which will hopefully have all the technological advancements missing from 5G). This has not been the case.
📌 Instead, now they have to rip out all that kit, and they have yet to receive a return on the investment they put into the current 4G and 5G infrastructure lol
📌 At the same time, Huawei, which is being targeted, owns 16% of all 6G patents published globally.
📌 So getting rid of Chinese companies under the guise of cybersecurity concerns or gold ol’ European protectionism would be potentially very good for Nokia and Ericsson.
📌 Some people argue that Beijing will retaliate with nasty tariffs of its own on Europe that will stifle Nokia’s business in China, for example, but analysts are saying that actually the potential income from getting more business from the 21 EU states currently using Huawei equipment will more than make up for that…
This episode of Roundtable airs next Tuesday at 3pm GMT on TRT World 📺
#cybersecurity #5G #cybersecurityact #nokia #ericsson #mobilenetworks #EU #technews #technology