Huawei finds its way back in Spain after being banished from the country’s 5G network

It seems as if Spain’s government has overridden the country’s businesses. After Huawei was expelled from Spain’s 5G network, the Interior Ministry has now helped the Chinese company find a way back.

The company and the Spanish Interior Ministry made an agreement worth more than $12 million, which Huawei will receive for managing the storage of Spain’s judicial wiretaps.

Huawei won the contract after a standard public procurement agreement. It will use its OceanStor 6800 V5 storage servers to classify and store information legally intercepted by state security agencies.

Euro News reports that this isn’t the first time the company has been involved with Spain’s sensitive infrastructure – it previously provided the country with legal interception systems (SITEL).

Nevertheless, this situation didn’t sit well with sectors such as the National Police and the Civil Guard.

Internal institutions have expressed concerns that while the country is cautious of foreign programmes, it allows a Chinese company to access sensitive data.

Spain is using Huawei’s Ocean Store model because it is considered a high-end enterprise storage system that can manage large amounts of data. It’s also cheaper than similar systems provided by Dell EMC, IBM, or Hitachi.

Even though Spain doesn’t avoid using systems by China-based companies, its companies don’t follow the same example. For example, Telefónica, a Spanish telecommunications company, shifted from Huawei by awarding a part of the 5G core network to Nokia.

This way, the Chinese company was removed from Spain’s telecoms infrastructure. In 2019, Telefónica chose Huawei for its 5G core, but had to switch due to the pressure from other countries.

Telefónica isn’t the only company that no longer uses Huawei’s services. Orange and Vodafone are also among those companies, thus marking the end of Huawei in Spain.

This is where the ambiguity stems from: the 5G network core is considered to be at risk regarding national security, while the country’s judicial wiretapping is managed by a Chinese company.