After much deliberation, the UK Prime Minister announces Huawei will be allowed a limited presence in non-core elements of 5G infrastructure.

DNA has started selling 5G phone and broadband subscriptions, ahead of rolling out services to 20 locations in Finland early this year.

Rakuten Mobile is expanding its ‘Free Supporter Program’ to an additional 20,000 participants, and says it is on track to launch the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualised cloud-native network in April.

Swisscom says it has successfully tested a private 5G network at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Italy’s newest mobile operator, Iliad, has asked courts to prohibit a 5G network-sharing agreement between Wind Tre and Fastweb, according to a report from Reuters.

The first wave of Orange Belgium’s industrial partners include the Port of Antwerp, chemical firm Borealis and polymer manufacturer Covestro.

The Japanese government is drawing up a 6G strategy setting up a dedicated panel on the technology, reports say.

Wholesale carrier BICS says 4G roaming traffic doubled in 2019 for the third consecutive year.

Telekom Austria's subsidiary A1 is set to roll out 5G on January 25 in 350 locations across 129 municipalities in Austria.

Vietnam’s biggest telecom company, Viettel, says it is the only operator in the world that is capable of producing its own 5G equipment. Some industry analysts are skeptical.

O2 has announced partnerships with Mavenir, DenseAir and WaveMobile to deploy Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) technologies in its network.

A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to provide more than $1 billion to develop Western-based 5G equipment alternatives to those from Huawei and ZTE.

John Strand of Strand Consult argues that restricting the use of Huawei and ZTE’s equipment from networks would not harm Europe’s mobile operators, nor meaningfully reduce competition or delay rollout – but it could greatly improve security.

A1-supported start-ups Azoomee and Scarletred have won the City of Vienna’s 5G Use Case Challenge.

The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said that security is paramount for the UK’s 5G networks but argued Huawei's critics must come up with an “alternative” provider.

Vodafone claims to be the first operator in the UK to activate 5G multi-operator radio access network (MORAN) technology, enabling providers to share base stations.

5G connections will reach 1.5 billion globally by 2025, up from 5 million in 2019, according to a Juniper Research – an annual average growth of 150% over the next six years.

This follows a request by the country's smallest operator, Telenet, for the authorities to explore the possible effects of the arrangement on competition in the market.

A report from Oxford Economics, commissioned by Huawei, reckons that barring vendors from the market, could cost countries 8% to 29% more for 5G over the next decade.

It is the first operator to deploy a ‘production-grade’, open-source evolved packet core (EPC), based on Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) Open Mobile Evolved Core (OMEC) platform.