Huawei has been losing presence little by little in the networks of main European operators. In February last year, Vodafone began to replace the Chinese manufacturer’s equipment for the most sensitive parts of its network, and has now been Movistar who has announced that he is going to replace all equipment from his huawei core network.
Telefónica announced in 2019 its strategy for the future with which it was going to diversify equipment purchases among various manufacturers to avoid supply problems or sales bans. The announcement coincided with the decision of the United States to block the sale of any of its network devices to operators in the country, alleging evidence of espionage of which nothing has been proven. However, Telefónica stated that its decision to diversify had nothing to do with it, but was only made from a technical point of view.
Now, Telefónica has bought equipment from Ericsson, but it has not transpired how much equipment they have bought or when the purchase was made. The cost is estimated around 10 million euros, which will be expanded in the future to several tens of millions of euros as they acquire new equipment. Telefónica will be the operator that will deploy the most 5G SA due to the obligations it has committed to when acquiring the part of the 700 MHz band with the greatest coverage. All this new 5G network will be independent of 4G, allowing you to take advantage of all the performance of the new standard. The massive deployment of this network will begin in 2022.
The core of Telefónica will be Ericsson
Telefónica had already deployed new Huawei equipment, but from now on it will be Ericsson who will provide the equipment for the core of its 5G mobile network. Huawei’s already deployed equipment will remain for the time being, but will eventually be replaced. In the case of the critical core, the equipment that will be used exclusively will be that of Ericsson.
Not using equipment from Chinese companies also makes it possible to cover for the fact that, in the future, the new 5G Cybersecurity Law prevent purchases from companies that may have a high influence from foreign governments, such as Huawei or ZTE.
In this way, it is confirmed that the entire 5G network of Telefónica will have equipment of Ericsson and Nokia network, both in the antennas and in the connections with the core of your network. Using different manufacturers will not be a problem thanks to Open RAN, where network equipment from different manufacturers will be able to operate under the same network.