The Echo was able to obtain the ministerial note on the security measures governing 5G suppliers. It will be voted on Friday in the Concertation Committee.
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High-risk 5G vendors are officially no longer welcome. There had already been no doubt about the question for a few months now, but it is now official. L’Echo was able to take a look at the ministerial note on the issue to be voted on in the Council of Ministers this Friday. It concerns concerns about the security of 5G infrastructures of certain suppliers. A few months ago, they finally resulted in a blacklist of companies considered to be high risk. The most famous of them is obviously Huawei, the undisputed leader in the deployment of 4G and which was in a good position to ensure its succession. The whole question was how to deal with these companies.
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Operators including Mobile Vikings and VOO will therefore not be affected initially.
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The answer is now cast in a draft royal decree. Unsurprisingly, it takes up most of what has already been known since last year. High-risk suppliers are excluded from the central part of the network, the most sensitive of the infrastructure. On the antenna part (RAN), high-risk suppliers can always be chosen by the operators, but their presence cannot exceed the 35% contribution for the entire network. Otherwise, high-risk suppliers are excluded from so-called sensitive areas. The latter are not mentioned explicitly, but will take up strategic places such as embassies or NATO.
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VOO and Mobile Vikings spared
In addition to the officialization of these main lines, the royal decree to be voted also brings its share of details on the practical way in which all this will be put in place. Concretely, the operators concerned by the measure are the “MNOs” (Mobile Network Operators), ie those with their own network. Clearly, Proximus, Orange and Telenet. “But the authorization system could be extended by royal decree deliberated in the Council of Ministers to other categories defined in the law, namely MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) and companies which deploy a private 5G network”, details the ministerial note. Operators including Mobile Vikings and VOO will therefore not be affected initially. In practice, however, these different operators rent the infrastructure of the country’s major companies, which are subject to legislation.
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The ministerial note also specifies the scope of the new decree. Only 5G will be affected.
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The ministerial note also specifies the scope of the new decree. Only 5G will be affected. The 4G infrastructure and the previous ones, largely installed here by the Chinese Huawei and ZTE, will be able to keep their current structure, “as long as these networks are not necessary for the transmission of radio signals from generations subsequent to the fourth generation (5G and following) “, nevertheless specifies the note.
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Finally, the draft decree provides that in the event of a change in the list of high-risk companies, the State undertakes to notify operators at least five years before the actual change, “in order to allow the operator to ensure the continuity of its services during the migration and to limit the impact on current contracts”.
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BIPT as a gendarme
Unsurprisingly, it will be up to BIPT, the sector regulator, to ensure that the legislation is respected by the various operators. In the event of non-compliance with the measures, the regulator may impose fines equivalent to 5% of turnover, or even withdraw operating licenses. The possibilities of arriving at such a situation are slim as such a network is so strategic for operators.
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In the event of non-compliance with the measures, the regulator may impose fines equivalent to 5% of turnover, or even withdraw operating licenses.
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Note that all the measures will be official from 2028 and 2031. The implementation of 5G should start next year. The deployment taking place over nearly a decade, operators will obviously not wait for this period to take the decision into account. Proximus recently announced a collaboration with Ericsson and Nokia. Orange will also work with the Finnish company. However, the operator has yet to announce the name of the company that will be responsible for the core of its network. For its part, Telenet has not yet made any announcement on its 5G partners.
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