The UK government today announced a ban on Huawei equipment in 5G wireless networks, along with a plan to urge home-Internet providers to stop buying Huawei gear. The UK government's announcement said that US sanctions imposed in May factored heavily into the decision, which was "taken today in a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) chaired by the Prime Minister [Boris Johnson]."

"Following US sanctions against Huawei and updated technical advice from our cyber experts, the government has decided it is necessary to ban Huawei from our 5G networks," UK Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said in the announcement.

Under the new rules, the UK said that "buying new Huawei 5G equipment [is] banned after 31 December 2020" and that "Huawei will be completely removed from the UK's 5G networks by the end of 2027." Today's announcement expands on an earlier ban that applies to the "most sensitive 'core' parts of 5G network[s]," the UK said.

US sanctions’ impact

The UK explained that US sanctions against Huawei "remov[ed] the firm's access to products that have been built based on US semiconductor technology." The UK said its technical experts at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) "reviewed the consequences of the sanctions and concluded [that Huawei] will need to do a major reconfiguration of its supply chain as it will no longer have access to the technology on which it currently relies and there are no alternatives which we have sufficient confidence in. They found the new restrictions make it impossible to continue to guarantee the security of Huawei equipment in the future."