The warning, made in an open letter from the Connect Europe lobby group, targets the bloc’s Digital Networks Act, unveiled in January.
The Act would give operators a three-year window to strip out equipment from any supplier designated high-risk on cybersecurity grounds, a category expected to capture Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE without naming them directly. The US has already gone further down this road, banning China Unicom and Pacific Network outright under its own covered-vendor list.
Signatories include the chief executives of Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica. The letter argues the plan “risks draining the sector of the very capital needed for fibre, 5G and 6G” infrastructure.
The proposal is now being negotiated between the European Parliament and the governments of the EU’s 27 member states.
Enforcement of an earlier, 2023 Commission push to strip Chinese vendors from mobile networks has been uneven. Sweden and Latvia are among the few countries to have actively enforced restrictions, while just 10 EU states had excluded Chinese hardware by the time of writing. Germany has agreed a phased removal with its operators, clearing Huawei and ZTE from 5G core networks by the end of 2026 and from transport networks by 2029. The UK, outside the EU, has ordered a full purge.
Vendor risk is one strand of a wider push by European operators to put network sovereignty higher up the infrastructure agenda, alongside route diversity efforts such as RETN’s new London-Brussels path, designed to reduce reliance on a small number of established transit corridors.
The tension between security-driven network design and infrastructure cost sits at the centre of Capacity Europe’s agenda next month.
Orange Wholesale CEO Michael Trabbia opens day two of the Market Forces Stage with a keynote, “The End of Neutral Infrastructure: Trust, Risk and Control in Europe,” followed by a panel on how sovereignty and security mandates are reshaping fibre, data centre and subsea network design.
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