Banning Huawei

Spend enough time in mobile phone discussions on X and you'll see the claim a lot, “UK 5G is rubbish because Britain banned Huawei” . It's become a kind of shorthand explanation, repeated often enough that it's treated as settled fact. As an independent, UK-based site with no ties to any network operator, we figured it was worth actually checking: what did the Huawei ban do, what did it cost, and is it really why your 5G bars sometimes look sad on the tube or in a shopping centre car park? The honest answer has more nuance than a tweet allows.

What Actually Happened

In January 2020, the UK government allowed Huawei to keep supplying 5G equipment, but capped it at 35% of the network's periphery (the mast-level radio equipment) and banned it entirely from the network's core (the sensitive central systems that route and manage traffic). It wasn't a ban yet, more a restriction.

That changed in July 2020. The trigger wasn't a new spying allegation; it was a change to US export rules in May 2020 that restricted Huawei's access to the chip manufacturing technology it needed to build equipment. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the body responsible for vetting Huawei's kit through a dedicated evaluation centre, concluded it could no longer verify the security of Huawei products built under those new, untested supply chains, assembled under time pressure from unfamiliar suppliers. That's a more specific and less dramatic reason than “Huawei is a spy risk”, though broader espionage concerns about Chinese state influence over network equipment had been part of the wider debate for years, and shaped how other countries acted too, as we'll get to.

The government responded by banning the purchase of any new Huawei 5G equipment from the end of 2020, and set a legally binding deadline of 2027 for removing all existing Huawei kit from UK 5G networks entirely.

Not Just Britain: The Global Picture

The UK wasn't first, and it wasn't acting alone. Australia banned Huawei from its 5G networks back in August 2018, nearly two years before the UK's full ban. The US, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan had all restricted or banned Huawei by the end of 2019. Canada followed in 2022, becoming the last of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance to act. Most EU member states took a softer approach, labelling Huawei a “high-risk vendor” and limiting its role rather than banning it outright, resulting in a genuinely uneven picture across Europe rather than a single unified Western response.

The Real Cost to the UK

This part of the claim checks out, the Huawei decision was expensive, and the government said so itself at the time.

That's a real, government-acknowledged hit, up to £2 billion and as much as three years of delay, mostly from operators diverting money and engineering time into ripping out and replacing Huawei kit instead of expanding coverage. So far, the online claim isn't wrong that the ban had teeth.

So Is That Why UK 5G Ranks So Badly?

Here's where it gets more interesting, because the underlying complaint about UK 5G quality isn't unfounded either. Opensignal's Q1 2026 study of European mobile networks ranked the UK dead last, 29th out of 29 countries, for overall 5G performance. Average UK 5G download speeds came in at 84Mbps, roughly a third of Denmark's 226Mbps. The UK also posted the lowest “excellent consistent quality” score in the study, and just 57.4% 5G availability, meaning the proportion of time users' phones could actually find a 5G signal to connect to. It's not an isolated finding either: a separate Which? study using Opensignal data found the UK has worse mobile coverage than every EU member state, and ranks last among G7 nations for mobile internet experience.

So yes, UK 5G measurably underperforms most of Europe. The question is why, and here the Huawei explanation runs into a problem, Opensignal's own study doesn't mention Huawei, vendor restrictions, or spectrum shortage as limiting factors at all. It explicitly states that spectrum availability is “no longer considered the limiting factor” it once was. And Australia, remember, banned Huawei two years before the UK did, and more completely, yet Opensignal's global rankings put it in the top 10 worldwide for 5G speeds, nowhere near the UK's bottom-of-the-table position in Europe. If the Huawei ban alone explained the UK's ranking, you'd expect other countries that banned Huawei, some earlier and more completely than the UK, to be struggling just as much. They aren't.

The Bigger Culprits

Independent analysis of the UK's mobile performance points to several other factors doing far more damage than the Huawei switch-out ever did,

1. Fragmented spectrum auctions: the mid-band frequencies 5G relies on were sold off in two separate stages, 2018 and 2021, rather than in one coherent package, making it harder for operators to plan and invest with confidence
2. Most UK 5G still isn't “real” 5G under the hood: the majority of UK 5G connections still run on Non-Standalone architecture, still leaning on 4G infrastructure behind the scenes, rather than Standalone 5G built on all-5G foundations (we've covered the difference between the two in detail in our piece on what 5G+ actually means)
3. Planning permission and local opposition: complex planning rules and local objections, often over health concerns not supported by evidence, or aesthetics, have slowed new mast building. The clearest example is the government's own Shared Rural Network programme, whose Total Not Spot element, new masts for areas no operator has ever covered, has been cut from a planned 258 sites to just 44, an 83% reduction, largely in the remote areas where objections have been fiercest (STV News, July 2025)
4. Chronic underinvestment relative to the scale of the task, and weak regulatory teeth, Ofcom largely relies on data supplied by the operators themselves, and its performance thresholds have been criticised as outdated

None of that is as tidy a story as “we banned a Chinese company and broke our own network”, but it's a far more accurate one.

A Genuine Bright Spot

It's not all bad news, either. The same Opensignal study found the UK spends 5.2% of connection time on genuine 5G+ (5G Standalone) networks, behind only Spain and Switzerland in Europe, and ahead of most of the continent. On the specific technology that actually unlocks 5G's real advantages, the UK is quietly doing better than its overall ranking suggests, and that matters more than the headline speed number, Ookla's own research suggests raw download speed increasingly isn't what separates a good 5G network from a bad one, with responsiveness and consistency, the exact things Standalone 5G is built to improve, mattering just as much.

A Possible Answer

The Huawei ban was real, it was expensive, and it did delay things, up to £2 billion and roughly three years, by the government's own figures. But blaming it for the UK's current bottom-of-Europe 5G rankings doesn't hold up well against the evidence. Other countries banned Huawei earlier and more completely without falling nearly as far behind, and the studies measuring UK performance today point mainly at spectrum policy, planning red tape, slow progress to Standalone 5G, and underinvestment, not the vendor switch from six years ago. The ban cost money and time; it isn't what's keeping your bars low today.

Curious how your own postcode actually performs? Run a free coverage check, or read our explainer on what 5G+ actually means for more on the Standalone 5G upgrade most UK networks are still rolling out.