When news broke Friday morning that Britain is looking to propose an alliance of democracies to build a 5G alternative to Huawei, you might think that that was the worst thing to happen to the controversial Chinese telecoms giant this week. In fact, it just caps off a series of fast-moving events that surely makes this one of the most decisive weeks yet in the global fight over next-generation 5G networks.
Key takeaways:
- This could be the first step towards a US-centric 5G, and result in dual standards moving forward.
- This gives more legs to Deutsche Bank's suggestion of a coming tech cold war, which "has the potential to split the world into two halves by a “Tech Wall” – two parallel tech regimes – a US centric one and a Chinese centric one, with little or no inter-operability".