Carrier fails to completely meet UK government's year-end deadline, for removal of Huawei equipment from core network.
The UK government's year-end deadline for BT to remove Huawei telecoms equipment from its core network has been missed.
The deadline had been 31 December 2023, and required carriers to remove Huawei equipment from their core of their network.
It should be noted that BT has actually removed almost all of the core telecoms infrastructure supplied by Huawei, but has yet to complete the process.
BT missing the deadline had been expected, after the UK carrier said last month it had not yet completed work to replace Huawei equipment in its core network ahead of the UK government's December deadline.
That deadline had already been moved backwards, after the British government last year had sent legal notices to 35 UK telecoms network operators to officially enforce this deadline.
In October 2022 the UK government extended the deadline for UK operators to remove Huawei equipment from its core networks.
The UK government gave operators until 31 December 2023 to remove Huawei 5G kit from network cores, compared to an original target deadline of 28 January 2023.
However the end of 2027 deadline to completely eliminate all Huawei equipment from the UK's 5G networks remains unchanged.
BT told Silicon UK before Christmas that its focus was now on the core network.
Now the FT has reported that BT has failed to fully hit an end-of-year UK government deadline for removing telecoms equipment supplied by Huawei, after delays in migrating its 2G and 3G services.
Government officials reportedly said UK carriers would be given some leeway, due to the difficulties in taking out essential parts of a network while still running services.
UK communications regulator Ofcom will report to the secretary of state by 31 March on UK carriers progress on the core network deadline.
A BT Group spokesperson told Silicon UK that it has already removed nearly all Huawei core equipment.
It should be noted that removing Huawei from the core of BT's live mobile network and migrating 30 million active customers across multiple platforms - while building a new 5G network and continuing to expand its 4G network - has been unprecedented task in terms of scale, cost and complexity for the UK carrier.
Meanwhile it is also understood that BT remains on target for the end of 2027 deadline to remove Huawei from the access parts of its mobile network.
The UK government, after many delays, had in July 2020 ordered all UK operators to remove equipment from 'high risk vendors' such as Huawei from Britain's 5G network by 2027, over national security concerns.
In order to satisfy this order, 4G equipment from Huawei also had to be removed.
Huawei has always denied it poses a national security risk.
In September and October of 2020, BT had announced it would to use equipment from Nokia and Ericsson to replace Huawei kit.
This Cyber News was published on www.silicon.co.uk. Publication date: Wed, 03 Jan 2024 12:13:24 +0000