Huawei signs 40 5G contracts

Hu Houkun was all poise and polish as he promised a 5G “revolution.”

Speaking at an annual global conference in the high-tech China city of Shenzhen, the rotating chairman of controversial telecom giant Huawei was bang on message.

“This year, 5G will trigger the tipping point in virtual reality and augmented reality, because it can solve the technological bottlenecks that are blocking the industry’s development,” he told his audience.

So far, the group has signed 40 commercial 5G network contracts although Hu was short on details.

He also confirmed that Huawei expects to ship more than 100,000 base stations to run the next generation of super-fast networks.

Apart from the figures, the details were again sketchy.

“Huawei has been actively taking part in 5G rollouts and we won’t see big changes in terms of our geographic involvement at the global scale,” David Wang, a senior executive at the company, said on the sidelines of the conference.

The poster child of the “Made in China 2025” program has come under mounting pressure during the past six months amid concerns that its technology will act as a backdoor for cyber spying by Beijing.

Huawei has constantly denied those claims.

But that has not stopped the United States from banning the group from selling 5G equipment to American companies. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand have followed suit.

Still, Huawei has received the strongest signal yet that it can take part in Germany’s 5G rollout.

Jochen Homann, the president of the country’s telecom regulator, made that clear when he told the Financial Times that no equipment manufacturer “should be specifically excluded.”

He said there was no evidence that the controversial telecom group posed a security risk.

“If Huawei meets all the requirements, it can take part in the 5G network roll-out,” Homann told the FT, adding that “security-related components may only be used if they have undergone IT security checks by an approved testing body and have been certified by the Federal Office for Information Security, the BSI.”