The past two years have seen the UK government, under pressure from the USA, becoming increasingly hardline in its attitude to Huawei’s presence in national networks, but incumbent operator BT says it may not hit the deadline to remove the vendor’s products from its networks. In January 2020, it had ruled that Huawei could have no more than 35% of the UK’s mobile and fiber networks, but later that year, it imposed more stringent restrictions, ordering operators to stop purchasing any 5G equipment from the Chinese company by the end of 2020; to remove existing 5G equipment from the core by January 28 2023 and the RAN by 2027; and to reduce Huawei’s overall presence across all networks to…