The Catalan Court of Public Sector Contracts has partially upheld the appeal presented by Telefónica and Cellnex against the award of the XCAT network contract to sirt and Huawei. The project to interconnect the strategic infrastructures of the Catalan territory will not be able to rely on hardware from China.
Why? Catalonia has a fiber optic backbone network, a backbone that supports the Catalan administration. Hospitals, educational centers, public data centers…
An infrastructure that has been around for years seeking independence with Spain and that, through the XCAT project, it was preparing its biggest technological leap in decades thanks to the local company Sirt Connecta and Huawei’s network technologies.
The offer. Providing it with a budget of 127 million, the Generalitat was finalizing a plan to connect more than 5,400 institutional headquarters. All with its own infrastructure so as not to depend on national giants such as Telefónica, Vodafone or MásOrange.
Sirt’s offer with Huawei was the best valued by the CTTIthe computer lung that supports digital services in Catalonia, but Telefónica and Cellnex filed an appeal before the Catalan Court.
not so fast. Despite offering a cheaper proposal, Telefónica-Cellnex saw the balance tip towards the Sirt-Huawei proposal. They thus presented an appeal in which they challenged the award of the contract, criticized the technical assessment and indicated their doubts about the technical solvency and real capacity of Sirt to execute said contract.
The Catalan Court of Public Sector Contracts has partially upheld the appeal presented by Telefónica and Cellnex, thus suspending the award.
There is more. The European Commission’s proposal for a new cybersecurity law, presented on January 20, makes the awarding of the contract even more difficult. Europe wants to expressly prohibit (although the law will not come into force for at least a year) the use of Chinese technology in fixed network infrastructure.
In other words, Catalonia cannot use Huawei equipment. If the court’s decision is appealed and the Sirt-Huawei solution is implemented, in just a year and a half all Huawei equipment should be replaced with others of Western origin.
The silent dismantling. In recent years, the three large Spanish operators have expelled Huawei from their network cores.
- Telefónica now works with Nokia and Ericsson
- Orange with Ericsson
- Vodafone with Nokia
The next step is what the Sirt-Telefónica conflict leaves us with: small local operators will also have to banish Chinese equipment from their hardware core to comply with upcoming European regulations.
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