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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 and Proximus chose Nokia to help build 5G networks in Belgium, as they abandoned Huawei amid pressure from the United States to exclude the Chinese company from supplying key telecom equipment.
The measures are among the first of commercial operators in Europe to remove Huawei from next-generation networks and come after months of diplomatic pressure from Washington, which alleges that Beijing could use Huawei equipment to spy.
The Belgian capital, Brussels, is home to the NATO alliance and the European Union executive and parliament, making it a subject of particular concern to US intelligence agencies.
“Belgium has relied 100% on Chinese providers for its radio networks, and people working in NATO and the EU were making mobile phone calls on these networks,” said John Strand, Danish independent telecommunications consultant.
“Operators are sending a signal that it is important to have access to secure networks.”
The United States welcomed the decisions of Orange Belgium and Proximus, which have a network sharing agreement.
“This is the latest example of the evaporation of Huawei’s deals and further confirmation of this global drive toward trusted suppliers,” said Keith Krach, US undersecretary in the State Department for Economic Growth, Energy and environment.
Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment provider, strongly denies the US allegations and has been highly critical of calls to ban it from 5G contracts.
However, he said on Friday that he accepted the decisions of Orange Belgium and Proximus, which confirmed an earlier exclusive from Reuters.
“This is the result of a tender organized by the operators and the result of the free market,” said a Huawei spokesman.
“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 remained unchanged.
The decisions leave Liberty Group’s Telenet as the only mobile operator in Belgium that has yet to say which provider it will use for its upcoming mobile networks. Telenet currently relies on equipment made by China’s ZTE and plans to announce its 5G decision in the first half of 2021, a spokeswoman said.
CLOSER SCRUTINY
The deals to supply radio equipment to Orange Belgium and Proximus are a boost for Nokia, which struggled to advance the 5G market earlier this year, even as Huawei was under pressure.
“I have been trying to become Orange Belgium’s RAN (Radio Access Network) provider since 2003, when the company was still Mobistar. Here we are, finally,” tweeted Tommi Uitto, president of Nokia Mobile Networks.
The companies did not disclose the value of the contracts.
Nokia shares rose 3% in afternoon trading.
Orange Belgium and Proximus said Ericsson would supply the core of their 5G networks, a smaller portion of the business.
EU members have stepped up scrutiny of so-called high-risk providers. This puts Huawei’s governance and technology under critical scrutiny and is likely to lead other European carriers to remove it from their networks, analysts say.
Nokia and Ericsson have been the main beneficiaries of the challenges Huawei faces. From Bell Canada and Telus Corp in Canada to BT in Great Britain, Nordic companies have been taking market share from the Chinese company.
Separately, Nokia said it had won a contract to provide data management software to Telefónica UK, which said the Finnish firm would replace less than 1 percent of Huawei’s kit on its network.
(Information from Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm, Mathieu Rosemain in Paris, Douglas Busvine in Berlin and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington DC, additional information from Foo Yun Chee, Sudip Kar-Guptaadn Benoit Van Overstraeten; edited by Jason Neely and Mark Potter)
