Yesterday morning BT announced that they were not using Huawei kit for 5G and they were stripping out Huawei kit from existing 3G and 4G networks. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46453425 Then yesterday evening, I discovered my BT mobile phone would not send texts. The problem was widely reported on the BT Community and the problem remains widespread and persists today. Then this morning we learn O2's data services go down. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46464730 Hmmmm....
Is it just commercialism, or is it a genuine concern about national security? I thought the same, when the government announced plans for future UK nuclear power stations to be built and operated by Japan and China. Governments in the past, have always kept the design and control of key energy assets under UK security. It's playing a dangerous game allowing any foreign power to have control of energy and communications systems.
Radio 2 was saying the o2 fault was a software failure from a Swedish supplier. The 4g network is still down although apparently 2g is ok. Although even voice has been very unreliable today - missed calls when my phone didn't even ring, etc. I've never known downtime last this long... with the exception of Virgin!
It’s very hard to load simulate this type of infrastructure and cack happens (got that tee shirt) - it smells of an upgrade that’s gone wrong and I anticipate service will restore overnight, The backlog of traffic might mean recovery will take a day or so. I always enjoyed the subsequent meetings to “make sure it doesn’t happen again”
I work for openreach and provide fibre to mobile masts and customers for all suppliers. Most of the equipment in the exchanges that this stuff runs off is huawei. Would be a very major job to replace it all in fact impossible.
