Millions of Brits are still on a Huawei core as government ban looms

Several years ago, telco customers of Huawei were hauled in front of parliamentary committees and grilled by politicians who evidently knew as much about telecom as the average infant. After the sudden, Trump-led backlash against the Chinese equipment vendor, authorities were determined to figure out why Huawei had such a commanding presence in UK telecom networks and how disruptive a switch to other vendors would be. But one company seemed to evade any scrutiny – the Sky business then controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Better known as the TV paymaster of UK soccer, Sky had signed a deal in 2015 with Spain’s Telefónica to piggyback on its O2 network as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). In this guise, it would be able to provide its own mobile services without the hassle and expense of building out a mobile network. Launch costs were put at £51 million (US$62 million) in the company’s 2017 annual report. While Sky did not have to buy antennas and other radio access network (RAN) equipment, it did invest in its own “core” network software, the brains of the system. And judging by a recent report in the UK’s Financial Times, the main provider of that software is Huawei.

The subject of that report was the service disruption caused by a swapout of Huawei products. Under government rules, companies using Huawei in the core of their operations must have removed it by the end of this year. That marks an 11-month extension of the previous deadline after BT, the only one of the four network operators with a Huawei core, reportedly asked for more time. John Strand, the CEO of Danish advisory firm Strand Consult and a prominent Huawei critic, sees the FT story as a ploy designed to make the government agree to a further extension.

“Seen from my chair, it looks like a hoax,” he said in comments emailed to Light Reading and sister site Telecoms.com. “The story has probably been produced to add pressure on UK gov to extend the deadline.” The last problems with Sky’s mobile service happened months ago and were unrelated to Huawei or any European suppliers, he believes.

Questionable and difficult moves

Neither Sky nor Huawei has denied that Huawei’s products are used in Sky Mobile’s core. The oddity is that Sky sought a relationship with the Chinese vendor in the first place. While government legislation forbidding the use of “high-risk” Chinese vendors dates back only a few years, BT and Vodafone had much older company policies not to put Huawei or ZTE in the network core due to security concerns. When BT bought the EE mobile business at the start of 2016, it already knew it would have to remove Huawei’s core network products to comply with its own rules. This was around the same time that Sky was signing its MVNO deal with Telefónica.

Most of the spending on a mobile network goes toward RAN construction, but replacing the core is reckoned by various sources to be more complicated. By its very nature, software is amorphous and cannot easily be unplugged. Code is liable to seep throughout a system and be as hard to clean up as liquid spilt over a cluttered area. This partly explains why telcos have ended up with silos and outdated legacy platforms in their business and operational support systems. New software is added while the old leaves a stain.

This is also probably why BT is still using Huawei’s core network products today, nearly eight years since it completed its takeover of EE. The operator has been shifting to a new core supplied by Ericsson and needs to have made the jump by December under the latest government orders. Until then, it must effectively deal with parallel cores and additional costs. There have been no reports of service problems on BT’s network linked to this migration, but the telco has evidently been taking its time.

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.