To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether the 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy, updated on 7 December 2020 seeks to increase the number of (a) existing and (b) new full-service suppliers to mobile operators; and which existing suppliers will be contacted.
Answered on
11 January 2021
The Government is committed to increasing choice, competition and resilience in the telecoms supply market. Central to this is the promotion of interoperable solutions - through open-interface deployment methods such as OpenRAN . The Government’s long-term vision is to make open interfaces the standard so that network operators have the flexibility to use multiple suppliers throughout their network, rather than being over-reliant on one or two. We want to see existing scale suppliers enter the market as well as the emergence of new suppliers. We are talking to a range of suppliers and are open to all new potential entrants that support our long-term vision of an open market.