The largest telecom company in the UK is still using Huawei equipment

When it comes to Huawei, we often link the brand with consumer electronic products. However, Huawei is one of the biggest telecommunication hardware manufacturers in the world. In addition to China, the company supplies communication infrastructure equipment to various countries. But this was also impacted by the embargo restricting access to Google services.

The company’s equipment was removed from critical infrastructure in several countries across North America and Europe. They were instructed to remove Huawei’s equipment before a set deadline. British Telecoms (BT Group), the largest telecommunications company in the UK, did not meet the deadline. The company holds a 50% market share in the UK. As of now, things are not good for the company.

When it comes to removing the equipment and replacing it with a new infrastructure, billions of dollars are required. For this reason, in 2020, the UK instructed the telecom companies to replace Huawei’s equipment by December 31, 2023. But BT either failed to reach this date or purposefully decided not to.

According to some sources, this matter is not serious at all. BT claims that Huawei’s 4G and 5G data equipment have been removed from the UK. This equipment covered 99% of mobile data traffic. The remaining 1% handles G and 3G connections. The choice to keep using these parts is mostly motivated by business concerns rather than a defense of Huawei.

The big mobile network companies are going to close their 3G networks in the UK by 2024-2025. From this perspective, we can assume that the company abandoned the plan to update the infrastructure for these networks. It is possible that the corporation did not want to invest billions of dollars in equipment that would become outdated in the coming years. Rather than this, a penalty would be much cheaper to pay. Regretfully, whatever the cause, Huawei will vanish entirely from a market in which it formerly held a prominent position.