Germany's Federal Network Agency has quietly reclassified the 5G radio access network as a critical network element, a regulatory shift that could strip Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica of their main legal argument for keeping Huawei equipment in their networks.

The move appeared in a filing to the European Commission this week, first spotted by Germany's WirtschaftsWoche newspaper. The draft regulation states that "all functions of the gNodeB are to be classified as a critical function, as material impairments of the same have an impact on availability, confidentiality, integrity and authenticity." A gNodeB, often shortened to gNB, is the technical term for a 5G basestation and its components, including the antennas.

The wording is bad news for Huawei and its German customers. Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges has repeatedly justified his company's reliance on Huawei by pointing to German law, which until now has not treated the RAN as a security-relevant part of the network. "The question is 'is an antenna a critical element, yes or no?' and, you know, we can argue that now," he told a German conference in 2023. "Under the German law, it is not perceived as a critical element."

That defense may soon collapse. If the RAN becomes critical infrastructure by regulatory definition, the German government will struggle to avoid an outright Huawei ban — a step it has resisted for years, partly for fear of Chinese retaliation against German trade interests. When Sweden banned Huawei in 2020, Ericsson's China revenues fell sharply in what looked like reprisal.

A slow squeeze since 2024

The reclassification did not come out of the blue. The Bundesnetzagentur included much the same wording in a consultation document last November. It also builds on an explicit government order issued in July 2024, which identified "the risks posed by critical components from Huawei and ZTE in German 5G mobile networks" and required operators to remove those parts. Note the word "critical" — the same term the regulator now applies to the gNodeB.

All three German telcos accepted that order. It obliged them to remove Huawei from the network core by the end of 2026 — a deadline operators said was largely moot because they had already done so — and to replace parts of Huawei's RAN management system, though not the RAN itself, by the end of 2029.

Experts inside both the vendor and operator communities have long argued that swapping out the management layer alone does nothing to address the core concern: that Huawei software might contain backdoors allowing Chinese state access to European communications. Modern basestations run heavily on software, not just electronics and cabling.

"It's just like removing Windows updates from your PC and replacing it with another update solution," said John Strand, CEO of Danish analyst firm Strand Consult and a critic of the 2024 order. "It's still a Windows PC."

Huawei's 58% problem

The stakes are enormous. Strand Consult estimates Huawei currently accounts for about 58% of Germany's RAN footprint, roughly 46,000 sites. Replacing it would cost about €50,000 ($56,260) per site, or less than €2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) in total — figures that broadly match earlier estimates from Barclays. That sum equals only about 5% of the three operators' collective annual revenues, and Strand notes other countries have completed swap-outs without disruption.

Huawei has fought the criticality argument before. "gNB should be removed from the definition of critical components of a 5G network," it told the Finnish telecom regulator in a submission last year. "The gNB does not control traffic, manage connections or user profiles, and is not responsible for controlling access to the network."

The Bundesnetzagentur's filing makes clear where vendors stand. "While one of the four manufacturers is clearly against expanding the list of critical functions, the other three are clear supporters," the agency said, adding that the dissenting vendor cited "disproportionate costs and regulatory burdens" that would harm the digital ecosystem. The other three, by implication Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, "emphasize the integral part of the end-to-end security architecture and point to the relevance of the RAN for the entire network."

Operators hedge, slowly

The operators' positions diverge. Deutsche Telekom announced plans almost two years ago to replace Huawei across about 3,000 sites — a small share of a network that previously relied on Huawei for about two thirds of its RAN, with Ericsson covering the rest — but has given no official progress update since. Vodafone, which used Huawei at 55% of German sites and Ericsson elsewhere, said last year it would bring Samsung into Germany as a third RAN vendor, though the scope of Samsung's role remains unclear. Telefónica, whose network is split roughly evenly between Huawei and Nokia, has made no comparable move and appears to be betting that compliance with the 2024 order will satisfy regulators.

There are also technical doubts about whether the management-layer workaround can even work. Deutsche Telekom has been developing a vendor-independent service management and orchestration (SMO) platform with French systems integrator Capgemini, which it showcased at Mobile World Congress and plans to deploy across its European networks. But an expert source says SMO would have to run alongside the traditional element management system rather than replace it — and part of Huawei's EMS handling configuration management must go to satisfy the government order. Telefónica Germany, according to sources, intends to expose Huawei's RAN data to an independent tool via the older OSSii interface, an approach that would require close cooperation from Huawei itself.

After the Bundesnetzagentur's intervention, that cooperation looks increasingly fragile. Unless the draft regulation is softened, a full swap-out of Huawei's German RAN — at a cost the operators can afford but clearly do not want to pay — may be hard to avoid.