LG U+ uses Huawei despite US warnings

According to the Korea Times, LG Uplus, South Korea's third-largest mobile operator, is attracting increasing attention from investors and industry experts, who want to know whether it will abandon Huawei's equipment in light of the situation in the United States.

The Trump administration's demand that South Korean companies stop using Huawei equipment is hampering LG Uplus' growth, industry officials said on Tuesday. They said the sanctions will inevitably hit LG Uplus but the mobile operator will find it difficult to replace current equipment with those made by other manufacturers.

Japan's Softbank recently decided to buy 5G base station equipment from Ericsson and Nokia, with the two Swedish and Finnish suppliers respectively announcing that they were selected by Ericsson.

In March, Denmark's largest mobile operator TDC A/S chose Ericsson to build its 5G network instead of using its existing supplier Huawei, and BT Group also announced that it would soon remove Huawei's equipment from the core of its mobile network to avoid possible risks of cyber attacks.

But LG Uplus said it would continue to use Huawei equipment for its 5G base stations to ensure compatibility between LTE and 5G networks.

"It will be difficult for us to replace Huawei's equipment with other equipment. We have been using Huawei's LTE network services. To ensure compatibility between LTE and 5G, we are using Huawei's equipment," an LG Uplus official said.

But an industry analyst said the United States is a very important market and the U.S.-led boycott will continue to cast a shadow over LG Uplus' prospects.

"Given that LG Uplus has invested huge sums in Huawei's equipment, it is almost impossible to replace it all. All they can do is keep a low profile and wait for the war to die down," said a telecom industry official.

The move follows a Reuters report that global technology companies including LG Uplus, Qualcomm and Intel have banned their employees from having informal conversations with Huawei employees.

The report said, "Such meetings are a routine part of international conferences where engineers gather to develop technical standards for communications technology." But some technology companies have restricted direct communication between employees and Huawei employees because "they want to avoid any potential problems with the US government."

In response to the report, LG Uplus said it had not issued such a policy to employees and that the report was baseless.

In addition to the boycott, Huawei has a bad reputation for being vulnerable to cyber attacks, but LG Uplus said there were no security issues using Huawei equipment in its 5G base stations because the products are isolated from secure networks.

"There are concerns that information could be leaked when using Huawei equipment. These concerns do not apply to us because identification and management of user information is handled in the wired core network. To build our wired core network, we have been using equipment from Samsung Electronics," the company official said.