Ooredoo cocked a snook at legislators worldwide by deciding to source 5G technology from Huawei in both radio access and core networks in five of its ten markets – Kuwait, Oman, Indonesia, Tunisia and the Maldives – during the coming five years.

It's fair to say that governments in a number of markets, led by the Trump administration, have been extremely vocal in their opposition to China-based telecoms vendors, particularly Huawei, with the latest reports suggesting the US government even plans to provide up $1 billion to rural US wireless network operators so they can rip out their Huawei equipment.

Despite the global furore, Huawei is still winning deals, as illustrated by Ooredoo's announcement and the vendor's recent trials with Turkcell, for example.

The Qatar-based operator said it will use Huawei's 5G SingleRAN radio solution with advanced massive MIMO technology, as well as the vendor's 5G Cloud Core solution with a convergent platform, to "provide customers with the latest 5G technologies and services."

Ooredoo has already launched 5G services and devices in Kuwait in collaboration with Huawei, and said it is accelerating the deployment of more "5G-ready" network stations in Kuwait and Oman.

But Ooredoo isn't Relying on Huawei for everything: It's worth noting here that the operator is using Nokia tech for its 5G cloud-native core network in Qatar and has also trialed Ericsson 5G equipment after signing a contract with the Sweden-based vendor in 2019.

Furthermore, Ooredoo teamed up with ZTE for 5G development in Myanmar.

Indeed, US efforts to halt the progress of Huawei and ZTE in global equipment markets have largely failed so far, according to data published recently by Dell'Oro. The market research firm said the Chinese equipment vendors both managed to grow their share of revenues from the world's overall telecom equipment market last year, while Cisco and Nokia suffered declines.

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— Anne Morris, Contributing Editor, Light Reading