The three MNOs that account for almost all of Portugal’s mobile customers have collectively announced they will not use Huawei equipment in their core 5G infrastructures. The move announced by NOS, Vodafone and Altice covers routers, servers and gateways inside the fixed backbone networks that connect to the RAN via backhaul. This is further evidence of MNOs pre-empting governments and regulators by deciding on their own to keep Huawei out now in order to avoid more costly switches towards other vendors later on. As it becomes increasingly clear the tide is flowing against Huawei in Europe at any rate, more operators are likely to follow suit by banning Huawei from their cores. This then leaves the question of whether bans…