Taiwan’s five major telecom operators have been named 5G Clean Networks by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a top US think tank.
Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom and FarEastTone made it on the list for the first time. Asia Pacific Telecom, Taiwan Star Telecom and Taiwan Mobile were also on the list.
Clean Networks is an effort by a coalition of countries and companies to secure their key telecommunications, cloud, data analytics, mobile apps, Internet of Things, and 5G networks from malign actors. It opts to rely only on trusted vendors who are not influenced or controlled by authoritarian governments, such as the Chinese Communist Party.
In April, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that all networks connected to US diplomatic agencies must be clean paths, which means there must be no Chinese companies or Chinese 5G networks.
Other 5G Clean Networks include France’s Orange, India’s Jio, Australia’s Telstra, South Korea’s SK and KT, and Japan’s NTT. The UK’s O2 and Canada’s Rogers, Bell and Telus have also stopped working with Huawei.