U.S. lawmakers forcing UK to reverse Huawei 5G decision

According to Reuters report, Individuals from the U.S. Congress on Wednesday made another move to attempt to push Britain to turn around its choice to permit China’s Huawei Technologies Co to construct parts of the UK’s next-generation 5G networks.

Republican senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio proposed legislation requiring the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review Britain’s place on the foreign investment “whitelist,” which exempts some Australian, Canadian and UK companies from increased U.S. scrutiny of their foreign investments.

On the same day, a U.S. Senate committee heard testimony from Nokia (NOKIA.HE) and Ericsson (ERICb.ST) about how rural U.S. carriers can swap out equipment from Huawei and ZTE Corp (000063.SZ), also from China, to stay within recently issued federal rules.

“We need to do more to shore up our own network defenses against hackers and state-sponsored actors, especially in our nation’s rural and underserved communities. This effort will require the development of a comprehensive strategy to secure the telecommunications supply chain,” said Senator Roger Wicker, the Commerce Committee’s Republican chair.

Steven Barry, who heads the Competitive Carriers Association, said at Wednesday’s hearing rural carriers were “essentially attempting to rebuild the airplane in mid-flight” by having to remove and replace network equipment.

Huawei mentioned that the congressional legislation was “considerably underfunded, it will take longer than anticipated and could put at risk some of our customers.”

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