Telus isn’t waiting for Ottawa to decide whether the country’s wireless carriers can use equipment from China’s Huawei in their new 5G networks.
Doug French, the company’s chief financial officer told the National Post today that it plans to include Huawei in the access part of the network, not the core, when the new 5G network goes live.
That will be “shortly,” he said. “Our initial module will be with Huawei.”
The announcement comes after the U.K. decided carriers there could only put equipment from “high-risk” countries — like China — in their 5G networks at the edge. This is to meet security concerns that servers and switches in a telecom network core could access sensitive government data.
It also comes as network partner Bell has said Nokia will be its first 5G network equipment supplier. Bell and Telus have been using Huawei equipment for years.
However, critics — including the U.S. government — maintain that unlike current 4G networks the new 5G networks process a lot of data at the edge so for all practical purposes it can’t be separated from the core.
The Canadian government has the final say here and has been weighing its options — allowing…
