ATHENS – With the European Union wary over the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei’s possible connections to that country’s government, Greece’s biggest phone company, Cosmote, picked the Swedish firm Ericsson to develop a 5G network.

The United States also warned that countries should not go with Huawei complaining that it’s a spy arm for China and now British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, reportedly told that China hid the number of deaths and spread of the COVID-19 virus, is said to be rethinking allowing Huawei to set up 5G in the United Kingdom.

The 5G program is the fifth generation of wireless communications technologies supporting cellular data networks. Large scale adoption began in 2019 and today virtually every telecommunication service provider in the developed world is upgrading its infrastructure to offer 5G functionality although Internet freedom groups said that governments are also using the COVID-19 crisis to spy on citizens through their mobile phones to track them and locate where they are.