Finland’s telecom firm Nokia says it will replace Chinese Huawei as Britain’s largest equipment provider for 5G networks across the country.
With the announcement, the company is set to become a major beneficiary of Huawei being blocked from the UK’s 5G networks.
The deal will also replace Huawei with Nokia in BT Group’s 2G and 4G networks. Under the deal, Nokia will supply base stations and other network equipment to allow its customers access 5-G internet.
In July, the UK government announced that all mobile providers would be banned from buying Huawei’s 5G equipment after 31st of December.
It said all UK mobile providers must also remove all 5G kits of the Chinese firm from their networks by 2027.
In a statement, the BT Group said that it will also use other suppliers to replace the totality of its Huawei 5G equipment. CEO Philip Jansen said with this next stage of our successful ties with Nokia we will continue to lead the rollout of fixed and mobile networks to deliver stand out experiences for customers.
It is anticipated that BT will soon make a deal to buy kit from a second vendor to avoid becoming solely dependent on Nokia once Huawei’s kit is banned outright.
Nokia’s president Pekka Lundmark said he was glad to become BT’s largest infrastructure partner.
Huawei’s spokesman said that reducing the number of infrastructure equipment providers risked delaying the 5G roll-out and sabotaging diversity of supply so essential to network security.
Earlier, BT had picked another Nordic telecoms kit provider Ericsson to replace Huawei’s equipment in its core parts of its network that route data and voice calls across computer servers to get them to the right destination.
