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Deal
Orange Belgium, a subsidiary of France’s Orange, said on Friday that it had selected Nokia’s radio team to revamp its existing networks and roll out its future 5G network.
FILE PHOTO: The Nokia logo is seen on the Nokia Paris-Saclay campus as Nokia employees demonstrate during a strike called by unions in Nozay, near Paris, France, on June 30, 2020. REUTERS / Benoit tessier
STOCKHOLM / PARIS: Orange Belgium has selected Nokia’s radio team to renew its networks and roll out 5G, the French subsidiary Orange said on Friday.
Reuters reported on Thursday that telecommunications operator and local rival Proximus had decided to progressively replace mobile devices made by Huawei in Belgium and Luxembourg with Nokia devices.
While the United States pressures its allies to exclude Huawei from 5G networks for security reasons, China and Huawei deny the espionage allegations.
The Belgian capital, Brussels, is home to the executive body and parliament of the European Union, making it a matter of particular concern to US intelligence agencies.
“This is the result of a tender organized by operators and the result of the free market,” a Huawei spokesman said on the matter.
“We embrace fair competition, the more diversified a supply chain is, the more competitive it becomes,” he said, adding that Huawei has been supplying equipment in Belgium for more than a decade and its commitment remains unchanged.
Members of the European Union have focused their attention on so-called “high risk” providers. This puts Huawei’s governance and technology under critical scrutiny and is likely to lead to other European carriers removing it from their networks, according to analysts.
Nokia and its Swedish rival Ericsson have been the main beneficiaries of the challenges Huawei faces.
From Bell Canada and Telus Corp in Canada to BT in the UK, Nordic companies have been snatching market share from the Chinese company as telecom operators seek to remove any political uncertainty as they build next-generation networks.
Orange Belgium said it would start its 5G radio network by connecting the existing core infrastructure provided by Ericsson along with preparations for a separate 5G network.
Proximus has also chosen Ericsson to supply the core of its 5G network in Belgium.
Nokia shares rose 2% in early trading on Friday.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm and Mathieu Rosemain in Paris, additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Benoit Van Overstraeten; Edmund Blair and Jason Neely edited)
