The company said in a statement that Turnbull had made the incorrect comments to Sky News on Wednesday morning.

"It is possible to have equipment from what you might call high-risk vendors in fixed-line networks where the equipment is at the edge of the network and the risk to the overall networks because the equipment is at the very edge of the network is much less," the former PM was said to have told Sky News in response to queries about the decision taken in August 2018 to ban Huawei from tendering for 5G in Australia.

“In 5G, where my government did take the decision to take high-risk vendors out of it because of the different nature of that network, because of the virtualisation of that network and the distributed processing of it there isn’t really an edge [to the network] in the way that there is in many of the traditional fixed-line networks," Turnbull added.

The statement pointed out that the British Parliamentary Committee on Science and Technology had said in a recent report to Parliament that there was a clear separation between core and (non-core) Radio Access Networks in a 5G network architecture.

Committee chairman Norman Lamb was quoted as saying: "Although the Australian Government has concluded that the distinction between core and non-core elements of 5G networks will be less clear than for previous technology generations, we heard unanimously and clearly that a distinction between the core and non-core elements of a 5G network will still exist.”

This is not the first time Turnbull has made statements like this. In March, Jeremy Mitchell, the company's director of Corporate and Public Affairs, accused Turnbull of spreading myths about the lack of separation between the 5G core and radio access network during a speech he gave in the UK.

Regarding his comments on Sky News, Mitchell said on Wednesday: "It is very disappointing that Turnbull continues to rely on factually incorrect information when commenting on his government’s decision to exclude Huawei from delivering 5G in Australia.

“As has been seen from multiple real-world deployments of commercial 5G networks in countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Spain and South Korea, operators are using Huawei technology in their Radio Access Networks and [equipment] from other vendors in their core networks.

“This proves unequivocally that the core and RAN networks can – and are – being split in 5G deployments in the real world – which disproves the incorrect advice he (Turnbull) was given.”