LONDON, 1 January 2026 — The deadline is fixed and the clock is running. By the end of 2027, every piece of Huawei equipment must be removed from the core and radio access layers of Britain’s 5G networks, a mandate handed down by the government in 2020 following security concerns and sustained pressure from Washington. For BT, Vodafone, and Virgin Media O2, the programme represents one of the largest and most technically complex infrastructure transitions in the history of British telecommunications. The engineers who understand it most intimately, those who actually designed, deployed, and operated the systems now being dismantled, are, by definition, among the rarest people in the industry. Oghenemaero Oteri is one of them.
Oteri, who holds a senior advisory role at a leading IT provider in Mississauga, Canada, spent the better part of a decade working within Huawei’s global telecommunications deployment ecosystem before the geopolitical tide turned against the Chinese manufacturer’s presence in Western networks. Across Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Lesotho, and the Comoros Islands, he was responsible for the design, deployment, and optimisation of the packet core network infrastructure that Huawei built for major mobile operators including MTN and Globacom, systems architecturally identical to those now being systematically removed from BT’s network. That experience, combined with his subsequent transition into the cloud-native and containerised architectures that are replacing Huawei’s legacy systems, has given him a perspective on the British rip-and-replace programme that very few engineers anywhere in the world can claim.
The practical challenge facing British operators is not simply one of substitution. Huawei’s packet core systems were deeply integrated into network operations, management frameworks, and performance monitoring pipelines over many years. Replacing them requires not only new hardware and software but a wholesale reimagining of how the network is operated, configured, and maintained. The successor architectures, built around cloud-native network functions running on containerised platforms orchestrated by systems such as Kubernetes, represent a fundamentally different operational paradigm. Engineers capable of working fluently across both worlds are extraordinarily scarce, and the British transition has intensified demand for precisely that combination of expertise.
Oteri has spent the past several years working across multiple telecommunication vendors and network operators, building these capabilities in real world environments. He led a series of initiatives that modernized core network operations from heavily manual processes toward automation-first frameworks, using scripting and orchestration technologies to automate more than seventy percent of repetitive provisioning, configuration management, and compliance verification tasks. He also contributed to the architectural work of migrating packet core functions onto containerised, Kubernetes-based platforms, a transition whose technical requirements mirror those now confronting British operators almost exactly.
Lewis Ebinum, a broadband systems planning consultant who worked alongside Oteri across multinational telecommunications projects spanning more than fifteen years and several countries, said the breadth of that experience was without obvious parallel among engineers he had encountered.
“What makes Oghenemaero exceptional in the context of what is happening in the UK and across Western networks right now is that he does not just understand the theory of the transition. He has operated those Huawei systems at national scale, and he has built the cloud-native frameworks that are replacing them. That combination is genuinely rare, and the industry knows it.”
The scale of Oteri’s Huawei-era deployments gives that assessment particular weight. Packet core networks are the central intelligence of a mobile system, managing subscriber mobility, data routing, authentication, and service continuity for every connected device. They are not peripheral components. When Oteri deployed a new Evolved Packet Core network in the Comoros Islands, working largely independently to bring connectivity to a population that previously lacked it, he was operating at the most demanding level of telecommunications infrastructure engineering. The system he built became the foundation of mobile broadband for tens of thousands of people on those islands.
His financial contributions to network efficiency have been equally concrete. Through the application of predictive capacity modelling techniques, Oteri identified opportunities to optimise the performance of existing infrastructure before committing to hardware expansion programmes, enabling the deferral of approximately twenty percent of projected capital expenditure at one major operator without degradation in service quality. In an environment where British operators are simultaneously funding the removal of existing infrastructure and the procurement of replacement systems from alternative vendors, the ability to extract maximum value from current assets before spending on new ones is not a marginal consideration. It is central to the economics of the entire transition programme.
Tolulope Ogunlade, a packet core specialist in Ontario, Canada who collaborated with Oteri on network operations for MTN Nigeria, said that kind of quantifiable engineering impact was the distinguishing characteristic of his work.
“In networks of this scale, the gap between a technically proficient engineer and an exceptional one shows up in measurable outcomes. Oghenemaero’s work consistently shows up in outcomes. The automation results, the capacity planning, the reliability improvements, these are not marginal gains. They are the kind of results that change how an operator thinks about what its network can do.”
Oteri was recently named Most Outstanding Core Data Network Engineering Professional of the Year at the Nigeria Technology Awards in Lagos, the tenth edition of a ceremony that has documented the country’s technology talent for a decade. He won the equivalent emerging professional category at the same event in 2019, a span that reflects a career trajectory rather than a moment. He holds advanced certifications in cloud-native infrastructure, including Certified Kubernetes Administrator and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer credentials issued by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and has contributed research to peer-reviewed publications on network governance and technology adoption in emerging markets.
As the 2027 deadline approaches, the real challenge facing Britain’s telecoms executives may not lie in the technology, but in the shortage of the highly specialised expertise needed to deliver a smooth transition, expertise that remains rare and is embodied in careers like Oteri’s. The engineers who understand the systems being removed, who can also design what replaces them, did not emerge from Western institutions or Western networks. They came from the countries where Huawei built its global infrastructure base, trained by necessity on systems that are now politically off-limits in London, Brussels, and Washington. The expertise the industry most needs for this transition is distributed across precisely the talent pool that built what it is now tearing out.
Oteri, who has spent his career solving problems that other engineers found intractable, offers a characteristically understated summary of where the work stands.
“Every network transition looks impossible until you understand what you are actually replacing and why. The architecture changes. The operational model changes. But the goal is always the same: a network that works for everyone who depends on it, without interruption, and at scale. That has not changed.”
In Britain in 2026, with the deadline ticking and billions of pounds committed to a transformation whose technical complexity the public debate rarely captures, that kind of clarity has a value that is difficult to overstate.
