The St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador city council voted to approve the installation of nine Huawei rooftop antennas, amid controversies surrounding the Chinese company.
Rogers put in the application request to install the nine antennas on top of a building on Bonaventure Avenue, according to the CBC.
The request met all of the “requirements set out by the city for where they should go,” according to Councillor Maggie Burton.
Rogers confirmed to the CBC that the 4G network antennas are passive, which means that they do not have technology that could process data or modify radio signals. It is important to note that Bell and Telus use the majority of Huawei equipment in its network infrastructure. All carriers have said it does not have any Huawei equipment in its core network, which is where the most vulnerable information resides.
It’s also worth noting that Rogers has partnered with Ericsson to deploy 5G networks.
Canada is currently reviewing 5G and whether or not Huawei should participate in providing equipment for the rollout of 5G networks. A decision has not been made yet.
Tensions between Canada and China arose after Huawei’s global CFO, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada in December. The U.S. has warned its allies to prohibit Huawei from working with companies as it believes it poses a national security threat. In May, U.S. President Donald Trump banned the company from working with U.S. companies.
Huawei has repeatedly said that it will comply with all governments and recently told MobileSyrup that it is ready to sign no-spy agreements with the Canadian government to ensure the rollout.
“A lot of us new councillors haven’t approved one of these or haven’t done much of this so we wanted to look at the siting protocol documents to make sure that this was in line with that — and it is,” Burton told the CBC.
The city developed wireless equipment guidelines and rules in 2014, which the Rogers’ proposal was able to meet.
Source: CBC
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