Romania goes ahead with Huawei 5G ban

Despite the best efforts of Huawei’s lawyers, Romania is the latest country to bar Chinese vendors from its 5G networks.

Romania and Poland were persuaded to join team America when it came to excluding Chinese vendors from its 5G networks because they might help the Chinese state with espionage, or something. On top of being a diplomatic win for the US, it also represented yet example of the European Union failing to act collectively.

Huawei’s lawyers were alert to this awkward situation and attempted to challenge the Romanian and Polish moves on the grounds that they contravened some EU regulation or other. That was five months ago and it seems that either the EU has failed to act with its usually desperate urgency or Romania decided to ignore it.

Reuters reports a member of the Romania government confirmed to it that the law is going ahead. “The government just approved this bill of paramount importance for Romania, sealing a 2019 memorandum signed in Washington, meaning that China and Huawei are ruled out from any would-be partnership on 5G with the Romanian state,” Pavel Popescu told Reuters.

To the best of our knowledge the Romanian mobile market consists of private companies, much like the rest of Europe, so it’s not clear what this ‘partnership with the state’ talk signifies. Perhaps something was lost in translation, because all the signs are that this prohibits Orange, Vodafone, etc from using Huawei or ZTE kit in their Romanian 5G networks. We wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar announcement from Poland soon.