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The
former monopoly's decision is likely to please U.S. authorities,
which have been seeking for months to convince European allies
to ban Huawei from telecoms networks on concerns that the
Chinese firm could be used to steal Western secrets --
assertions it strongly denies.
Orange, considered a strategic asset by the French government,
uses Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson for its current
mobile networks, on which part of the next mobile technology
will be built.
"For Orange France, it was the easiest solution," a source close
to the operator said, adding that it followed negotiations and
experiments using Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei products.
Huawei was not immediately available for comment.
A recent decree aimed at screening all telecoms equipment to
prevent espionage did not offer enough clarity for France’s
telecoms lobby FFT, which insisted that guarantees needed to be
made on the issue.
The general fear in the French telecoms industry is that the
authorities actually want to ban Huawei but will not say it
publicly.
In an interview in Les Echos on Thursday, FFT's head Arthur
Dreyfuss said the industry would ask for compensation in the
event that Huawei's equipment ends up being de facto excluded
from the deployment of 5G in Europe.
Comments by the European Union industry chief Thierry Breton in
an interview with Le Monde on Wednesday supported this
interpretation, as he noted that China had laws allowing the
state to have access to all kinds of data.
"Telecoms operators mustn't select risky suppliers, which could
allow a state, for example, to take control of strategic sites
such as capital cities, areas of intense military activity or
nuclear power plants," Breton said.
France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI is set to issue its first
decisions regarding equipment it has screened in the coming
weeks.
Earlier this week, the EU followed Britain's example in allowing
members to decide what part Huawei can play in its 5G telecoms
networks and resisting pressure from Washington for an outright
ban.
EU countries can either restrict or exclude high-risk 5G vendors
such as Huawei from core parts of their telecoms networks,
according to the new guidelines, which seek to address the
cybersecurity risks to the bloc's 28 countries at a national and
EU level.
(Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain, Benoit Van Overstraeten and
Sudip Kar-Gupta; editing by David Evans)
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