Huawei decision frustrates provincial government

It has been about two years since the Government of Saskatchewan made the decision to keep Huawei out of SaskTel’s 5G network.

Now the federal government has made a similar decision, but it’s complicating SaskTel’s plans.

Don Morgan, the minister responsible for SaskTel, said he had been trying to talk to the federal government years ago about Huawei and 5G but didn’t hear anything definitive. So the province went ahead and made its own decision, choosing Samsung technology instead.

Now, the federal government is announcing Huawei is banned from Canada’s 5G networks, but Morgan said there was something else as well.

“The thing that they tucked into this was we must also stop using the existing 4G equipment even though there’s never been a risk — it’s a fundamentally different product,” Morgan told Gormley on Wednesday.

“Now it puts SaskTel in a very difficult and rather cumbersome position of how they go ahead with the 5G rollout.”

The province will have until 2027 to take Huawei out of SaskTel’s 4G network.

Morgan said that equipment will have started to enter the end of its life anyway but this will speed up the timeline on doing that and speed up the $200-million cost.

“Now we’re not able to take any of the equipment (and) redeploy it elsewhere in remote areas or anything. It’s the fact that they’ve added this on and I don’t believe they’ve done that anywhere else in the world except for in Canada,” said Morgan.

Morgan said this is a problem and the provincial government is frustrated and angry with the federal government.

The 4G network will have to stay around for a few years, according to Morgan, as some people won’t upgrade their devices for a while. Morgan also said the 5G rollout in Saskatchewan has been going without a hitch, besides some concerns about 5G near airports.