“We are not taking a pre-emptive decision to ban any actor, or any company,” German government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference in Berlin on Monday.

 

The United States has piled pressure on its friends to exclude Huawei, the major telecoms equipment vendor with a global market share of 28%, saying its gear consisted of ‘back doors’ that would most likely allow China to spy on other countries. German operators are all customers of Huawei and have warned that excluding the Chinese vendor would add years of delays and billions of dollars in costs to launching 5G networks.

 

The Shenzhen-based company has refused the accusations by Washington, which imposed export controls on Huawei in May, hobbling its smartphone business and raising questions over whether the Chinese company can maintain its market lead. U.S. officials have also suggested that, under China’s national intelligence law, all citizens and companies are expected to collaborate in espionage efforts. Officials said Germany’s security catalogue was due to be published shortly, confirming a previous decision to keep a level playing field for suppliers to next-generation networks that will power lightning fast mobile broadband services or run ‘smart’ factories, offices and cities.

 

Along with billions of devices, sensors and cameras expected to be hooked up, 5G networks will be a lot more widely used than their predecessors. At the same time, the fact that 5G networks rely more on software that can be easily updated makes it harder to keep track of cyber threats. The German rules come after the European Union last week informed of the risk of increased cyber attacks on 5G networks by state-backed actors. A report compiled by member states stopped short, however, of singling out China as a threat.

 

Network operators Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE), Vodafone (VOD.L) and Telefonica Deutschland (O2Dn.DE) are going to be required to identify and apply enhanced security standards to essential network elements, the Handelsblatt daily reported earlier, citing the draft rulebook. More broadly, suppliers should be certified as trustworthy, giving customers legal recourse to exclude them and seek damages if proof is found that equipment had been used for spying or sabotage.

 

Certification of critical equipment would for the time being have to be attained from Germany’s cybersecurity authority, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Those requirements were in line with key ground rules set back in March ahead of the drafting of the full set of rules by the Federal Network Regulator (BNetzA) and the BSI.

 

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