Nokia and Ericsson, two leading telecom network makers, have started drawing up plans to move some of their sensitive operations out of China.
Nokia and Ericsson will also split up their supply chains to counter national security issues, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
There will also be changes to corporate structures of Nokia and Ericsson. They may set up separate units in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, in a bid to protect themselves against the escalating global trade war.
Finland-based Nokia and Sweden-based Ericsson make equipment to run 5G networks and compete with Huawei, ZTE and Samsung in the telecom network market.
Do not talk to Huawei
Intel, Qualcomm, InterDigital Wireless and LG Uplus have asked their employees to stop talking about technology and technical standards with counterparts at Huawei Technologies
The U.S. Department of Commerce has not banned contact between companies and Huawei. In fact, the agency authorized U.S. companies to interact with Huawei in standards bodies through August as necessary for the development of 5G standards.
The new restrictions could slow the rollout of 5G. At a 5G standards meeting last week in Newport Beach, California, participants privately expressed alarm to Reuters that the long-standing cooperation among engineers that is needed for phones and networks to connect globally could fall victim to what one participant described as a “tech war” between the U.S. and China.
Meanwhile, Nokia announced an enhanced security program and setting up an advanced security testing and verification laboratory to address security needs of 5G end-to-end (E2E) networks.
Nokia security lab
Nokia is opening the Future X Security (FXSec) Lab — an extension of Nokia’s Future X network lab in Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill — enabling communications service providers and industries to facilitate joint testing and verification of industrial automation solutions in private local area networks (LANs) and across public wide area networks (WANs).
“Opportunities around end-to-end 5G networks come with security risk that must be addressed end-to-end, using an array of novel techniques and technologies,” said Marcus Weldon, corporate chief technology officer of Nokia Bell Labs.
Nokia will be incorporating research from Nokia Bell Labs to create Network Slicing Security Solutions that will ensure security the end-to-end network slices – the critical connectivity and service fabric for industrial applications in the 5G era.
Nokia Bell Labs has the leading patent filings in key areas of security of 5G and E2E networks – including aspects of multi-tenancy, slicing, and industrial IoT – and for trust and patch management, remote attestation, security management and orchestration.
