By Iain Morris, International Editor, Light Reading
October 2, 2026
Ever since European Union authorities formulated their famed "5G toolbox" to systematically strip Chinese equipment vendors out of critical telecom infrastructure, a faction of the region’s largest network operators has fought tooth and nail to keep them in play. A stark measure of their obstinacy—and their ultimate success—is the fact that Chinese vendors continue to command a surprisingly healthy share of the European telecommunications market. This resilience persists nearly seven years after the European Union first published its security guidelines.
According to a recent report from Assembly Research, Chinese infrastructure providers still serve roughly a third of all business across the continent. Notably, this market share is overwhelmingly dominated by Huawei, while the presence of ZTE, China’s other major developer of 5G network products, remains almost negligible.
These operators have found a powerful ally in the national government of Europe’s biggest economy. For years, Germany has prevaricated on the issue, occasionally striking a stern diplomatic posture while steadfastly resisting any aggressive legislative clampdown. Politicians in Berlin have undoubtedly kept a worried eye on Germany’s lucrative, multi-billion-dollar trade relationship with Beijing. When Sweden enacted a strict ban on Huawei back in 2020, Ericsson suffered a subsequent, steep drop in its China revenues that was widely interpreted as direct political retaliation from Beijing.
Mindful of these economic crosswinds, German telecommunications regulation has historically remained soft and permissive. Because the continent’s most powerful member state repeatedly chose to ignore Brussels’ strategic guidance, other European nations felt little compulsion to act decisively on their own.
However, recent developments in Germany could soon make defending Huawei an untenable position for telecom giants like Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Vodafone. In the past, whenever Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges was asked to justify his company’s continued, heavy reliance on Huawei equipment, he would readily point to existing German legislation. That legal framework traditionally did not classify the radio access network—commonly known as the RAN—as a matter of national security concern.
"The question is ‘is an antenna a critical element, yes or no?’ and, you know, we can argue that now," Höttges stated bluntly at a German industry conference back in 2023. "Under the German law, it is not perceived as a critical element."
That convenient regulatory cover, however, may be about to evaporate entirely.
Let’s Get Critical
In a little-noticed filing submitted to the European Commission this week, which was first uncovered and reported by Germany’s WirtschaftsWoche newspaper, the German Federal Network Agency has executed a decisive policy rethink. The national regulator has now concluded that the RAN should be legally deemed a critical infrastructure element after all.
While the administrative language within the document is characteristically arcane, its practical implications are unmistakable to industry insiders. The filing specifically refers to a gNodeB—frequently shortened to gNB—which is the fundamental technical nomenclature for a 5G base station and its associated hardware components, including the radio antennas.
The new draft regulation explicitly states that "all functions of the gNodeB are to be classified as a critical function, as material impairments of the same have an impact on availability, confidentiality, integrity and authenticity." This apparent reclassification has not arrived without warning. Last November, the Federal Network Agency, known locally as the Bundesnetzagentur, floated much of the same hardline wording within an official consultation document.
As dry and technical as talk of a gNodeB might seem to everyday laypeople, the formal designation of the RAN as critical infrastructure by Germany’s national regulator changes the political landscape dramatically. It would make it virtually impossible for the German government to avoid banning Huawei outright.
That the technology presents a tangible security risk is not actually disputed by either the federal government or domestic German operators. If the matter were truly in dispute, Berlin would never have issued an explicit administrative order in July 2024. That government directive formally identified "the risks posed by critical components from Huawei and ZTE in German 5G mobile networks" and legally demanded that operators phase out and remove those specific parts. Observers have widely noted the deliberate use of the word "critical" in that order—the exact same terminology now embraced by the Bundesnetzagentur in its latest draft regulation.
Implicit in Höttges’ long-standing defense of the Huawei relationship is an uncomfortable contradiction: an implicit acceptance of the very risk the Chinese vendor represents. If he genuinely believed otherwise, he would not have justified Deutsche Telekom’s ongoing deployment of Huawei gear on the narrow technicality that RAN components are excluded from critical status under legacy laws. Instead, he would have argued that regulatory criticality is entirely irrelevant because Huawei hardware is inherently no riskier than competing equipment from Ericsson, Nokia, or Samsung.
Navigating the Mandates
All three major German telecommunications providers formally agreed to follow the federal government’s July 2024 order. Initially, compliance meant purging Huawei hardware from the core network—the technological brain of the operation—by the end of 2026. For the operators, this instruction initially seemed somewhat moot, as they publicly claimed they had already taken those core-stripping steps independently in the interest of network security. As part of that same government mandate, the telcos also signed up to replace a portion of Huawei’s RAN management software, though notably not the physical RAN equipment itself, by the end of 2029.
Yet, numerous technical experts, including engineers within both vendor and operator communities, have continually insisted that removing Huawei’s management systems alone fails to address the underlying security vulnerability. The long-running concern, which Huawei has consistently rejected, is that proprietary vendor software might harbor hidden "backdoors." These potential vulnerabilities could theoretically allow the Chinese government to conduct state espionage on European communications or even launch disruptive cyber sabotage operations against critical infrastructure networks. Modern cellular base stations are no longer simple collections of passive electronic circuitry and copper cabling; they are sophisticated computing nodes packed with dense, complex software.
"It’s just like removing Windows updates from your PC and replacing it with another update solution," remarked John Strand, CEO of telecom analyst firm Strand Consult and a staunch, vocal critic of the government’s phased approach. "It’s still a Windows PC."
Huawei is acutely aware that the Bundesnetzagentur’s official reclassification could spell absolute catastrophe for its lucrative European RAN business. The Chinese manufacturer has previously fought aggressively against any administrative attempt to categorize the RAN as a critical network asset.
"gNB should be removed from the definition of critical components of a 5G network," Huawei argued in an official submission to the Finnish telecom regulatory authority last year. "The gNB does not control traffic, manage connections or user profiles, and is not responsible for controlling access to the network."
Given these high stakes, Huawei is almost certainly the unnamed manufacturer referenced by the Bundesnetzagentur as fiercely resisting the proposed reclassification.
"While one of the four manufacturers is clearly against expanding the list of critical functions, the other three are clear supporters," the agency noted in its regulatory filings.
"As expected, the main criticisms of the negative position would be disproportionate costs and regulatory burdens, which would have a negative impact on the development of the digital ecosystem in the long term," the agency added. "The other manufacturers emphasize the integral part of the end-to-end security architecture and point to the relevance of the RAN for the entire network."
SMO Screens and Hardware Swaps
Determined to avoid the immense expense of ripping out and replacing thousands of Huawei base stations, Germany’s commercial operators find themselves closely aligned with the recalcitrant manufacturer’s position. Independent research conducted by Strand Consult indicates that Huawei is currently responsible for roughly 58% of Germany’s total RAN footprint, encompassing approximately 46,000 active cell sites.
Replacing this extensive hardware footprint would cost an estimated €50,000 per site, bringing the total estimated financial bill to less than €2.5 billion, according to Strand’s market calculations. Those figures roughly align with independent cost assessments previously published by investment bank Barclays.
While that multi-billion-dollar price tag sounds staggering, it would equate to only about 5% of the operators’ collective annual revenues. Strand argues that the expense is entirely manageable if spread out over a reasonable timeframe, citing the precedent of several other European nations that have already executed full vendor swap-outs without causing catastrophic network disruptions. For the operators, however, a forced ban carries another major drawback: it would drastically reduce commercial vendor choice in a European market that already suffers from a severe lack of alternative suppliers.
In what may represent an early sign of operators hedging their long-term bets, Deutsche Telekom announced plans nearly two years ago to proactively replace Huawei equipment across roughly 3,000 sites—representing a relatively small percentage of its total network footprint—using Nokia technology built on standardized open RAN, or O-RAN, interfaces.
Progress on this front has proven remarkably slow, however. "We reached the milestone of 1,000 sites live in 2025 and we are on track to deploy more than 3,000 O-RAN sites in Germany by 2027," a company spokesperson explained via email when asked for an official operational update. Historically, Deutsche Telekom relied heavily on Huawei for about two-thirds of its RAN infrastructure, with Ericsson supplying the remainder.
Meanwhile, Vodafone is understood to have deployed Huawei gear across roughly 55% of its German sites, with Ericsson handling the rest. Following a drawn-out commercial tender process to upgrade its broader European site portfolio, Vodafone revealed plans last year to introduce South Korea’s Samsung into the German market as a third major RAN vendor. However, the true ultimate scale and operational extent of Samsung’s prospective role remain murky.
The third major network operator, Telefónica Germany, has not initiated any comparable multi-vendor procurement moves. Instead, the company appears to be betting that it can successfully mollify regulatory authorities simply by complying with the bare minimum requirements of the government’s July 2024 security order. Telefónica’s domestic network is currently divided quite evenly between Huawei and Nokia.
Even if replacing Huawei’s RAN management software were theoretically sufficient to address perceived national security risks, significant technical doubts remain as to whether it can even be achieved in practice. The major operators appear to have collaborated on the internal development of their own proprietary technology to bridge the gap. Deutsche Telekom prominently showcased this approach earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress. The company has stated its firm intention to use this new service management and orchestration platform—built with engineering support from French systems integrator Capgemini—as a "vendor-independent" tool for managing all of its European network assets, rather than just those powered by Huawei legacy technology.
This ambitious strategy would, however, require substituting newer software architectures for older management systems built on deeply entrenched proprietary interfaces. According to expert industry sources, deploying an SMO platform alone would not actually facilitate the complete removal of the traditional element management system, a core feature of legacy RAN setups. Instead, the SMO framework would have to run in parallel with the existing EMS. Furthermore, a specific subsystem of Huawei’s EMS responsible for active configuration management would still need to be physically or logically replaced to achieve full compliance with the German government’s security orders.
Telefónica Germany’s current strategy involves exposing Huawei’s proprietary RAN operational data to the vendor-independent management tool via an older interface known as OSSii, which predates the advent of open RAN standards. Achieving this complex technical integration would demand deep, unprecedented levels of active collaboration from Huawei itself.
Without that cooperation, the only viable alternative would be a much more comprehensive and aggressive removal of Huawei’s underlying RAN hardware products altogether. In the wake of the Bundesnetzagentur’s unexpected regulatory intervention, executing a complete and painful network swap-out may finally be impossible for Germany’s telecom giants to avoid.
