After doing a massive U-turn and banning Huawei’s 5G equipment for deployment on nationwide networks, with a goal of completely eradicating the telecom operator from the country by 2027, the UK government is looking for substitutes, and has reportedly contacted Japan.
Britain named two firms as potential alternatives, Business Daily claims. The first one, NEC Corp has an existing 5G vertical business platform which provides intelligent connectivity of 5G networks. This gives innovative businesses and services improved performance, greater security and better reliability and allows their integration into its 5G ready Vertical Cloud Platform.
The second one is Fujitsu Ltd which is known for launching Japan’s first commercial private 5G network, and thus, a viable alternative to Huawei.
Discussions between officials from both nations regarding Japanese alternatives took place on Thursday, the details of which have not been disclosed. What we do know for sure is that Britain is mainly looking for suppliers which provide enhancements to the country’s networks and also are cost efficient.
If the Japanese firms are successful in providing these, we may expect to see an exponential growth in their mere 1% of the global 5G base station market. Currently, Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei have a dominating 80% share of global control.
Keeping in mind that by 2027 UK will have eradicated all of Huawei’s components completely from its mobile network, Ericsson and Nokia immediately proposed to step in as indigenous alternatives to the Chinese operator.
Earlier, the Japanese government had announced a massive subsidy to domestic companies for development of 5G wireless networks. The subsidy amount sums up to 70 billion yen($653 mn), and was undertaken to strengthen the country’s position as it continues to compete with China. Japan aims to provide safe networks and coordinated export to its allies, and with Huawei out from UK’s 5G scene, Japanese companies now have a better chance of global expansion in the growth of 5G technologies.
