UK incumbent telco BT has been a significant supporter of Huawei over the years, but has selected Ericsson to provide its next generation, cloud-native 5G core. When BT re-entered the mobile business with the acquisition of the UK’s largest MNO, EE, it inherited a Huawei packet core. It stated in 2018 that the Chinese company’s technology would be phased out. Despite BT’s extensive use of Huawei equipment in its fiber network and in EE’s RAN, the telco had an existing policy of excluding the vendor from the core. Initially, then, the decision to change EE’s supplier was in line with that policy, and of course, any change of heart was made impossible when the UK government decided that, in 5G,…