The European Commission is preparing to unveil its ‘toolbox’ for mitigating the risks associated with 5G on 29 January. According to the Reuters news agency, the toolkit will give Member States that wish to do so the ability to exclude Huawei from essential elements of their telecommunications network infrastructure.
A delicate context
The EU’s 5G Action Plan for 2016 set a target for the launch of 5G commercial networks by the end of 2020 at the latest. A number of EU operators have already launched commercial services, but EU-wide deployment of 5G is expected to start in earnest in 2020. To facilitate this process and under pressure from the Americans, the European Commission has set itself the task of ensuring the security of 5G networks by proposing that the Member States carry out a national assessment, then by conducting a coordinated assessment and, on this basis, defining a toolbox (see EUROPE 12222/23, 12300/5, 12345/1). Europe is in fact confronted with two contradictory orientations in this area, between the desire of the Central and Eastern European states to follow the American recommendations and to sideline Huawei and that of the Western European states, which are anxious to succeed in the race for 5G by purchasing services from the Chinese giant.
Maintenance from within the EU
In an interview with the French press, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said that all suppliers are welcome in Europe, provided they comply with “all the rules” laid down by the EU, including “a European location for computer maintenance activities”. The Commissioner indicated that 5G will appear in the form of thousands of smart antennas, all of which will be gateways that need to be protected. “This involves massive software, almost the largest on the planet, with thousands of kilometres of lines of code that inevitably contain bugs and that will have to be maintained and updated”, he explained to the newspaper Les Échos.
For its part, Reuters claims to have received confirmation from several people close to the dossier that high-risk suppliers could be excluded from essential elements of the 5G infrastructure. To explain further: according to the news agency, the toolkit will not identify a country or a company. It will, however, establish stricter security measures for high-risk providers with regard to sensitive parts of the network and the main infrastructure. Member States, for their part, will be urged to assess or even issue certificates to high-risk suppliers. They will also be asked to diversify their suppliers and not depend on a single company. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)