France’s largest telecom company chooses Nokia and Ericsson for 5G

Orange, France’s biggest telecoms company, said it had chosen Nokia and Ericsson to deploy its 5G network in mainland France, as China’s Huawei Technologies faces intense political scrutiny in Europe.
The former monopoly’s decision is likely to please U.S. authorities, which have been seeking for months to convince European allies to ban Huawei from telecoms networks on concerns that the Chinese firm could be used to steal Western secrets — assertions it strongly denies.
Orange, considered a strategic asset by the French government, uses Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson for its current mobile networks, on which part of the next mobile technology will be built.
“For Orange France, it was the easiest solution,” a source close to the operator said, adding that it followed negotiations and experiments using Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei products.