The UK government’s U-turn on allowing Huawei to supply the country’s 5G networks (see separate item) has all kinds of political and trade connotations. But it may also affect the cost and speed of deploying 5G, and put paid to successive governments’ vague but noisy promises to be a ‘5G world leader’. The operators, especially BT and Vodafone, had warned of potentially billions of dollars of extra costs if they had to rip out existing Huawei equipment, in a last-ditch attempt to persuade the government not to impose an outright ban, but to stick with its previous policy of capping Huawei equipment at 35% in the 5G RAN and in fiber networks, while barring the vendor from core networks. Even…