Telecoms · 27 April 2020

Germany's 5G push from Vodafone and Telekom meets political resistance

The telecoms providers want to accelerate their 5G build-out – using Huawei technology. Foreign Minister Maas and Norbert Röttgen are sounding the alarm.

What is at stake

Germany’s telecoms providers want to accelerate their 5G build-out – and are doing it with Huawei technology. Telekom promises 5G coverage for more than half the population by the end of 2020. Vodafone counters with ten million people. But right now, in the middle of the Covid crisis, political resistance is growing. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and CDU politician Norbert Röttgen are issuing public warnings. The debate over critical infrastructure has reached a new level of intensity.

The resistance from the foreign office

“We must not create dependencies on others – especially in the areas of critical infrastructure and future technologies,” says Maas. The remark falls during a pandemic in which Germany is experiencing exactly how dependent it is on Chinese producers for masks and medicines. The parallel with mobile network infrastructure is obvious. Röttgen, chair of the foreign affairs committee, also warns: “The network operators are not waiting – they are creating facts at breakneck speed.” Politicians feel overrun.

The conflict inside the German government

The grand coalition has been divided for over a year. The economics ministry, the chancellery and the interior ministry oppose an outright ban. The foreign office and Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, are warning against Huawei. That division leaves the network operators room to act. They are using it. As long as no law prohibits Huawei components in the German 5G network, Telekom and Vodafone are entitled to keep installing them. The result: the problem keeps being pushed into the future.

What is at stake

The issue is not purely technical. When 5G becomes critical infrastructure for industry, transport and healthcare, it determines how sovereign Germany will be. Chinese network equipment is technically good and attractively priced. But it comes from a system in which companies and the state in Beijing have been drawing closer together for years. Whoever wants to retain control over its digital backbone in the 5G era must make a decision. The German government is deferring that decision – but time is running out.

I wrote this piece together with Moritz Koch for Handelsblatt.

Published in Handelsblatt

April 27, 2020 ·Huawei Technology

Germany's 5G push from Vodafone and Telekom meets political resistance

The telecoms providers want to accelerate their 5G build-out – using Huawei technology. Foreign Minister Maas and Norbert Röttgen are sounding the alarm.

By Moritz Koch and Stephan Scheuer

Machine translation. The verbatim German original is on handelsblatt.com (link below).

Telekom's PR strategists are in full promotional mode, celebrating a "milestone in mobile" and a "turbo for high-speed". The reason: in Germany the company has launched the next phase of its 5G rollout. Telekom Germany CEO Dirk Wössner announced: "We want to cover more than half the population with 5G by the end of the year."

Shortly before, Vodafone had raised the pressure on Telekom. Germany CEO Hannes Ametsreiter promised to make 5G available to ten million people in Germany before the end of the year. Until now the company had focused the technology on a handful of major cities, he said: "Now we are bringing 5G to the wider area."

"The ambitious expansion plans of the telecoms companies rely in part on technology from a highly controversial supplier: Huawei. The Chinese market leader provides components and software upgrades with which Telekom and Vodafone are modernising their networks. This alarms Huawei critics in the Bundestag. "The network operators are not waiting – they are creating facts at breakneck speed," Norbert Röttgen, chair of the foreign affairs committee and candidate for the CDU leadership, told Handelsblatt.

"The lesson of recent weeks should be that we must not become dependent on countries like China when it comes to critical infrastructure. What applies to face masks should apply even more to our digital nervous system."

"Foreign Minister Heiko Maas also raised fierce objections to Huawei's involvement, hardened further by the pandemic. "The coronavirus has made one thing very clear: if we want to emerge from this crisis stronger, we can only do that if we coordinate closely within Europe, act together and can rely on our own capabilities," Maas told Handelsblatt. "We must not create dependencies on others – especially in the areas of critical infrastructure and future technologies."

The grand coalition has been debating for more than a year whether to allow Huawei into the 5G rollout. Economics Minister Peter Altmaier, Chancellor Angela Merkel (both CDU) and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) made clear they did not want to exclude any supplier outright. The foreign office and the BND argued that Chinese technology companies cannot be trusted.