Höttges vows to fight Huawei ban as Germany moves to reclassify 5G RAN

Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges says he will "fight" European and German efforts to ban Huawei from 5G networks, putting the cost of the EU's forthcoming Cybersecurity Act update at as much as €40 billion (US$45 billion) for the European telecom industry.

His comments, made on Deutsche Telekom's latest earnings call last week, come as regulators close in. Last month, Germany's Bundesnetzagentur filed a draft regulation with the European Commission that reclassifies the entirety of the radio access network — the "gNodeB", in 5G basestation jargon — as a critical function. Earlier this month, Handelsblatt reported that the German government is drafting plans for a comprehensive Huawei ban.

Höttges's resistance is not new, but the ground beneath it is shifting.

Why is the regulatory context changing?

EU officials previously only advised member states to avoid "high-risk vendors" — widely read as Chinese companies — when building 5G networks. Since the start of this year, the EU has been working on an update to the Cybersecurity Act (CSA) that would make avoidance of Huawei mandatory rather than advisory.

Germany's national rules have until now designated only two parts of the network as critical: the 5G core, the network's brain, and the management system for controlling and updating the RAN. Deutsche Telekom removed Huawei from the core and built a substitute management system with French integrator Capgemini. It has refused to go further.

The Bundesnetzagentur's new draft ends that distinction. "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," the regulator stated.

What did Höttges actually say?

On the earnings call, Höttges argued the CSA update would backfire. "They will lose resilience because we will lose time for the latest and most modern technology," he said. "So, therefore, I'm fighting against it. I think there is no necessity to push that forward."

He also questioned why telecom is being singled out when Chinese software pervades other European sectors. "I hear a lot of discussion that people are saying, by the way, 80% of the energy market and solar market is now dominated by Chinese vendors and the software for the solar panels is Chinese," he said. "We have a double-digit growth for cars from China now in Europe. These cars are fully steered with software from China."

His conclusion: "I do not know why we are now focusing only on the mobile network here in Germany, where we have no incidents and no kind of access to the infrastructure from the outside." He warned the industry faces heavy investment and would "lose time to market on 6G."

Huawei has long denied that its products contain backdoors, citing a lack of evidence. That denial has not changed the direction of EU policy.

How exposed is Deutsche Telekom?

Figures from Danish analyst firm Strand Consult quantify the dependency. Huawei accounts for roughly 58% of Germany's 5G RAN footprint — about 46,000 sites. Older 4G-era data showed Huawei supplied about two-thirds of Deutsche Telekom's RAN, 55% of Vodafone's and around half of Telefónica's, with Ericsson and Nokia serving the remainder. Strand Consult CEO John Strand estimates a full Huawei swap-out would cost no more than €2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) — a fraction of Höttges's €40 billion figure for Europe-wide impact.

Deutsche Telekom's own replacement effort looks slow. Two years ago it struck a deal with Nokia to replace Huawei at 3,000 sites. Last month a spokesperson confirmed Nokia had reached 1,000 sites in 2025 and was "on track" for the 3,000 target in 2027.

Even that plan carries risk. Nokia is channeling resources into Nvidia GPU-based products, and operators in trials remain concerned about GPU energy costs. Nokia has indicated its latest purpose-built 5G product, using custom Marvell silicon, will be its last. Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom is reselling the Capgemini-built management system to Vodafone and Telefónica in Germany, helping recover development costs. Höttges claimed the EU's proposed 36-month rip-and-replace timeline is "more or less off the table" — an assertion regulators have not confirmed.

Does the management workaround actually work?

Security professionals inside the industry have privately voiced skepticism that swapping out only the RAN management system addresses the alleged threat. Huawei's basestation software would remain in the network, and could theoretically harbor backdoors.

The integration question is also unresolved. Managing one vendor's RAN with another's system should be easier in an open RAN with standardized interfaces, but Huawei opposes open RAN. German telcos expect Huawei to expose RAN information via the older OSSii interface. If it refuses, the alternative is full removal.

The Nvidia angle adds a further twist. Jensen Huang is being investigated by Nvidia's own board over an alleged affair with a Chinese government spy; he has admitted infidelity and could lose the CEO job. A successor, amid signs of an AI slowdown, might not share his appetite for a RAN market that generated only about $35 billion in product revenues last year. Höttges, who had wanted a European supplier for his Munich AI data center before settling on Nvidia, may find that sovereignty is proving elusive on every front — which is unlikely to soften his opposition to the ban.