Brussels puts pressure on the Twenty-Seven and telecom operators to ban Huawei and ZTE

2023-06-15 18:14:35

The European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton YVES HERMAN / REUTERS

The European Commission considers that the implementation of the decisions taken three years ago is too slow. Brussels will ban the two equipment manufacturers from its own services.

Brussels is increasing the pressure around Chinese equipment manufacturers. During a press conference given on Thursday evening, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton asked the Member States of the European Union to move faster in the procedures aimed at ousting the Chinese equipment manufacturers Huawei and ZTE from the networks 5G.

While a decision was taken by member states to secure their mobile equipment three years ago, the commissioner felt that progress was too slow. “To date, only 10 Member States have used this possibility to limit or exclude certain high-risk providers, this represents a major security risk for the whole of the European Union”.

The Commission is taking its share of the effort, since it announced on Thursday that it would ban the two Chinese equipment manufacturers from all of its telecommunications service providers. In addition to Member States, Thierry Breton also called on operators to act. “It is as long as they seize this question”, indicated the commissioner, adding that it was not desirable to “maintaining citric addictions that can become weapons against us». «The vulnerability would be too severe for our common security“, he still judged.

If Brussels had initially given up on banning suppliers presenting a risk to the security of the continent, the lack of progress in this area changes the situation. And this, even if the subject is moving up the agenda of the governments of certain countries. Two weeks ago, Portugal’s cybersecurity council issued the recommendation to weed out vendors “at risk(of which Huawei is a part) of the 5G network. Earlier in the year, Germany also opened discussions in this direction. But it takes time. Too much in the eyes of Brussels.

Read also5G: Brussels could completely ban Huawei from Europe

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Thierry Breton announced that all Member States must now seize the toolbox offered three years ago to secure their critical telecom networks, and therefore oust Huawei and ZTE even if he did not formulate it too clearly. The path will be more difficult for some than for others. The situation is, for example, problematic in Germany, where a report by the Danish consulting firm Strand Consult, published at the end of December, amounted to 59%, the share of the Chinese group in the country’s 5G infrastructure.

Italy, Austria and Cyprus (which would depend 100% on Huawei) are also major customers of the Chinese group, according to the same report. Huawei also remains present in France on 5G. If each operator must obtain the green light from the National Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI) to install the antennas of the Chinese group, and if these are prohibited on certain critical sites (military, government, industrial) , the Chinese group still generates 10% of its turnover in France on these technologies.

There remains this paradoxical or even incongruous situation: the Chinese group is still a beneficiary of European subsidies within the framework of the European program Horizon Europe 2021-2027, and participates in 11 research projects, particularly in the fields of cloud or 6G. According to Financial Times, he would have received no less than 3.9 million euros under these programs. An amount that remains low, compared to the 95.5 billion euros of this same program.