The hiatus on new purchases has still occasioned delays that will slow down a plan to build 100 new cell towers over two years.

The province has authorized SaskTel to purchase more Huawei equipment, after holding off while the federal government weighed cybersecurity concerns related to the Chinese telecom company.

SaskTel said it ran out of inventory due to the temporary hiatus. That is expected to cause delays on a plan to build roughly 100 new cell towers across the province.

Distroscale

Don Morgan, minister responsible for SaskTel, confirmed Wednesday that the government has now given the green light.

“We’re following the lead of Bell and Telus and we’re using the Huawei equipment in the towers, and the product is excellent. It works really well,” he told the Leader-Post on the margins of the Municipalities of Saskatchewan annual conference.

“We’ve authorized it and said, yeah, we’re going to live with these towers,” Morgan added. “We don’t know when the federal government will resolve it.”

SaskTel has already installed about $200 million worth of Huawei equipment in its network. But the Chinese company has been enmeshed in controversy over its connections to the authoritarian state, as the U.S. urges allies to ban Huawei equipment from next generation infrastructure for security reasons.

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Chinese companies are obliged to co-operate with state intelligence services under Chinese law.

But Morgan said the equipment SaskTel is using on its towers is non-core infrastructure and will be used for the 4G, or fourth generation, network, not for the upcoming 5G rollout.

“The challenge will come when we’re doing a 5G upgrade,” said Morgan.

As of January, SaskTel had not purchased any new Huawei equipment over the 2019-20 fiscal year, though it spent $8.9 million for ongoing network maintenance, support and licensing.

Darcee MacFarlane, SaskTel’s vice president of corporate communications, said the company has continued to install Huawei equipment it had in inventory. But that has now run out, and SaskTel’s inability to make new purchases was beginning to cause delays.

SaskTel has a two-year plan to build 100 towers. MacFarlane said it wanted to have 40 to 45 done by the end of March. Now there will only be 15 ready to go by then.

Building a tower takes several steps, from buying land to running fibre and electricity to actually erecting the tower. Morgan said SaskTel was simply holding off on the antenna and radio equipment while the government waited to see what Ottawa was going to do.

The new authorization allows it to resupply. Morgan said the province is not only following the example of Telus and Bell, but also the United Kingdom, which has signalled it will use Huawei equipment on its non-core network infrastructure.

The federal government has still not signalled exactly what it foresees for Huawei’s role in the nation’s telecoms. Morgan said a decision forcing SaskTel to remove existing equipment would be a “worst case scenario.”