Mobile industry ‘to discuss Huawei crisis’ at MWC board meeting

Mobile industry ‘to discuss Huawei crisis’ at MWC board meeting

MWC Barcelona.jpg

Members of the world’s mobile industry are thinking of discussing the Huawei crisis at their pre-MWC board meeting this month.

A Reuters report at the weekend said Mats Granryd, director general of the GSMA, had proposed the topic for the GSMA board meeting the weekend before MWC, which starts three weeks today, on 25 February.

Huawei is facing exclusion from Canada, New Zealand and a number of countries in Europe and elsewhere after security fears, which the Chinese vendor denies. Huawei and its rival, ZTE, is already excluded from major operators in the US and Australia.

Exclusion threatens to disrupt operators’ roll out of 5G services over the next few years. Huawei and ZTE hold a substantial fraction of the patents critical to 5G technology.

However, the GSMA told Capacity this morning that the agenda for the meeting “has not been agreed yet”.

An official said: “At each MWC event the GSMA board members meet to discuss topics pertinent to the industry. However, I cannot confirm what is on the agenda for discussion in Barcelona later this month.”

Capacity contacted Granryd and a number of GSMA board members but they did not respond.

Meanwhile Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou is due to appear in a Vancouver court on Wednesday, where she faces a number of serious fraud charges from the US, which is wanting to extradite her from Canada. Meng is the daughter of the company founder Ren Zhengfei.

 

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