Hutchison’s Three mobile operating companies have been some of the most immediately affected by the uncertainty around Chinese 5G vendors. In Australia, the first country to follow the Trump administration’s wishes and bar Huawei from 5G networks, the third MNO – Vodafone/Three joint venture VHA – was in loud opposition, because it has a 4G network from Huawei and would have to go through a far more onerous deployment of first-phase 5G (Non-Standalone, which still uses the existing 4G core) if it had to change to a new supplier. In Italy, Hutchison’s Wind Tre arm recently reintroduced ZTE to its network modernization contract, having initially replaced it with Ericsson because of the threatened sanctions (Ericsson still has some of the…