LONDON (Reuters) – BT CEO Philip Jansen on Monday urged the British government not to move too fast to ban China’s Huawei from the 5G network, cautioning that if it did there could be outages and possibly even security issues.
“If you are to try not to have Huawei at all, ideally we would want seven years and we could probably do it in five,” Jansen told BBC radio.
Asked what the risks would be if telecoms operators were told to do it in less than five years, Jansen said: “We need to make sure that any change of direction does not lead to more risk in the short term.”
“If we get to a situation where things need to go very very fast, then you are into a situation where potentially service for 24 million BT Group mobile customers is put into question – outages,” he said.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbride, editing by William James)
