Although 5G is not expected to arrive in France until summer next year, operators have already sent their requests to ANSSI (French National Cybersecurity Agency) to find out if they will be able to use Huawei equipment. Unfortunately however, it seems the administration isn’t just refusing, but outright not replying to queries at all.
Huawei is no longer entitled to supply new antennas to operators in the United States. However, it can still offer its services to European countries like Germany and Great Britain. In France however, there are some peculiar problems playing out between the government and telecom operators over 5G development and Huawei equipment.
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A law aimed at securing the 5G network, promulgated a few days ago, stipulates that operators must validate with ANSSI, who are in charge of monitoring electronic services – placed under the authority of the Prime Minister, any radio towers the telco want to deploy. On top of this, any query not replied to in over two months amounts to a refusal, and submissions regarding Huawei equipment currently aren’t being responded to.
As it stands, ANSSI and the French government aren’t responding to any queries regarding the use of Huawei equipment in 5G networks for the country. There’s a general lack of information for the telecommunication companies to go off, and it’s resulted in a rather frustrating experience for them according to reports and interviews.
A manager at Orange, a French telco” tells in an interview from Frandroid that “We want to understand the rules of the game so that we don’t get stuck afterwards. Even at ANSSI, everything is not crystal clear… Everyone is waiting for news. So we want to test the mechanism.” This essentially means that due to these issues from the government, they can’t test their networks.
This applies to all telcos submitting these files to ANSSI. Despite this, all companies are still pushing for Huawei equipment, as SFR has already submitted files for the antennas of Huawei and Nokia. Bouygues plans to send its file quickly, and Orange also intends to try to file files for equipment from Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei, even though it does not use antennas of the Chinese brand for its 4G network.
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(Source)
