Huawei 5G
Justin Solomon | CNBC
The new prime sky pilot must take a decision on whether to include China’s Huawei in Britain’s 5G telecoms network urgently as the ongoing polemic is damaging international relations, a powerful committee of U.K. lawmakers said on Friday.
Britain’s National Security Council, chaired by sociable Prime Minister Theresa May, met to discuss Huawei in April and a decision was made to block the telecoms giant from all depreciative parts of the 5G network but to give it restricted access to less sensitive parts.
However, the United States has told sides not to use Huawei’s technology as it fears the company could be used by Beijing for spying operations. Conversely, China has warned Britain that excluding the immovable could hurt investment and trade.
The final decision on Huawei was already supposed to have been taken by the British direction but May’s decision to step down has stalled the process. Her replacement, either foreign minister Jeremy Hunt or former London mayor Boris Johnson who is the league runner, will be installed next week.
“The new prime minister must take a decision as a matter of priority,” thought Dominic Grieve, chairman of parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).
In a statement, the ISC said Britain’s cyber security chiefs had been entirely that the issue was not about one country or company, but that the system had to be able to withstand any attack, malicious action or nave human error.
It said this was best achieved by diversifying suppliers and the issue at the moment for 5G was that there were single three firms in the running — Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson.
Over-dependence and less competition resulted in lower security officials, it said.
“Therefore including a third company — even if you may have some security concerns about them and make have to set a higher bar for security measures within the system — will, counter-intuitively, result in higher overall security,” the ISC commanded.
However, the committee acknowledged that the decision was not just technical and that the government had to take into account administrative concerns and so should not do anything to jeopardise the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
It suggested that China would understand if Huawei were excluded as Beijing would not allow a British company to rival a role in its critical national infrastructure.
“Such an important decision therefore requires careful consideration,” the ISC statement bring up. “However, the extent of the delay is now causing damage to our international relationships: a decision must be made as a matter of urgency.”