In conjunction with a wide swath of industry stakeholders, the United States federal government is working to form and implement the creatively-titled National Strategy to Secure 5G. Signed by President Trump in March, the strategy has three primary goals: “facilitating domestic 5G rollout; assessing the risks and identifying core security principles for 5G infrastructure; managing the risks to our economic and national security from the use of 5G infrastructure; and promoting responsible global development and deployment of 5G infrastructure.”
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, took public comment on tenets of the plan up until June 25. NTIA received quite a variety of feedback ranging from thoughtful, comprehensive filings from Tier 1 carriers to input from private citizens like the mononymous Anne who said in a June 1 email, “Shove your 5g where the sun won’t shine. I will sue the shit out of you.”
Butchered idioms and tenuous cause of legal action aside, the comments to NTIA provide a fairly nuanced summary of discrete but overlapping trends in telecoms, geopolitics and macroeconomics. And not a moment too soon–the three Tier 1 U.S. carriers will likely all have nationwide 5G deployed by the end of the year whereas the National Strategy to Secure 5G hasn’t even gone into the oven just yet but that’s okay because Tier 1 U.S. carriers aren’t the focus here. Surprising no one, the focus here is more on the federal government’s ongoing campaign to pressure allies to avoid Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE (“promoting responsible global development and deployment of 5G infrastructure”) and, in the meantime, U.S.-based and other “trusted” vendors are jockeying for federal R&D funding and even market-based interventions so they can better compete primarily against Huawei.
So what does open RAN have to do with any of this? Based on a review of the comments to NTIA, a good deal. Specifically, the input reflects a belief that the collaborative standards-setting process related to open interfaces and supply chain diversification can both enhance security of 5G networks and the security of the economic machinations that depend on those networks.
At a high-level, the open RAN elevator pitch is that disaggregating hardware and software, and bringing new vendors into the mix, will give telcos more options. That optionality will also serve to break vendor lock-in and translate into lower equipment costs; lowering equipment costs helps drive network scale. And, in this new more diverse supplier landscape, vendors will be able to more rapidly innovate, further heightening competition and creating something of a virtuous cycle.
The Open Ran Policy Coalition was formed earlier this year to serve as a platform for the open RAN community to lobby federal stakeholders. Based on the coalition’s filing with NTIA, the group believes “that by standardizing or ‘opening’ the protocols and interfaces between the various subcomponents…in the RAN, networks can be deployed with a more modular design without being dependent on a single supplier. Developing, standardizing, and validating open interfaces will allow secure and reliable interoperability across different market players, lower the barrier to entry for new innovators, and lower the cost of adoption by service providers.”
Open RAN and rip-and-replace
In terms of actions the coalition suggests the federal government pursue, most of it boils down to providing various funding mechanisms. At a glance, the coalition asks that some of the $1 billion to $2 billion earmarked to replace Huawei and ZTE equipment that’s deployed in smaller U.S. networks go to open RAN vendors. “The Coalition recommends that Congress specify that a portion of this funding should be reserved for recipients who elect to use the funding to deploy open RAN network equipment” as defined by the O-RAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project.
In addition to a carve out for rip-and-replace, the coalition also wants at least $1 billion for relevant research and development; “a multilateral global fund of at least $750 million” to deploy open RAN in foreign markets; for the U.S. Department of Defense to actively use open RAN technologies in relevant programs; and work through international funding agencies (EXIM Bank, USAID, and the International Development Finance Corporation) “to develop incentives or include preferences” to facilitate open RAN deployments in global markets, including India and Brazil.
The thesis here is that Chinese network equipment vendors, Huawei in particular, have seen major growth based on financial-backing from the Chinese state–credit lines to facilitate long-term financing for buyers, for instance. To level the playing field, the U.S. needs to follow suit.
Parallel Wireless CEO Steve Papa has been particularly outspoken in this area, noting that because China has tilted the market, the U.S. can either do the same or cede leadership. “We can sit back and shout ‘free market’ all we want and let this strategic loss happen,” he said in an email. “We can try to stop China from doing it (good luck), or we choose to fight back and subsidize more R&D in this area.”
Free markets or managed markets?
This line of thinking quickly expands from just open RAN to a larger conversation around macroeconomics, U.S/China relations and a whole host of attendant issues, including development of a strategy to counter China’s efforts to gain semiconductor fabrication expertise under the auspices of the Made in China 2025 program.
Elizabeth C. Economy, senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, covers this in her 2018 book, “The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State.” From that text, “In the area of trade and investment, China’s Made in China 2025 seeks to prevent foreign competition in a wide swath of cutting-edge technologies by absorbing leading technologies and technology firms from abroad and at the same time preventing international firms from competing in China. The first line of defense for the United States should be to strengthen its own innovation capacity through government-supported investment in basic research and the creation of an incentive system–market based and otherwise–that encourages the development and adoption of new technologies.”
For another multilateral policy-focused perspective we turn to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank. Writing in “Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited,” Stiglitz reflects on trade restrictions and competition. “Globalization, though, is shaped by politicians at home and abroad. And so it’s easy to think of what one could do to stop imports: impose trade restrictions. Those ‘others’ are engaged in unfair competition. When I was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, I frequently heard pleadings from those in the business community who were resolutely in favor of competition and against subsidies for others. But they were eloquent in explaining how at that moment and in their industry competition was unfair and destructive, and a little government help–sometimes in the form of subsidies, often by protecting them from ‘unfair’ competition from abroad–would be of enormous benefit, not to themselves personally, but to their workers and their communities. When those who seem to be outcompeting oneself are foreigners, the inclination to say that they are engaging in unfair competition is irresistible: to argue otherwise is to suggest that one simply doesn’t measure up.”
The Tier 1 operator view
In the U.S. the Tier 1 operators all have some flavor of 5G in-market and built their networks working with incumbent infrastructure vendors Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung Networks. AT&T has been perhaps the most vocal of the three regarding open RAN, with the operator’s CTO sitting on the O-RAN Alliance board and publicly discussing trial activities with Nokia.
In its filing with NTIA, AT&T Services Inc., mentions open networks in general a number of times and open RAN five times. And while the company does detail how it sees government participating in 5G, one of the primary points, which is aligned with other feedback from operators and some vendors, is that the feds should focus on rules that speed up 5G deployment and make more mid-band spectrum available.
On security, AT&T pointed to the work done by existing standards-setting bodies and asks the government “to avoid imposing security requirements or standards on industry…government should recognize the existing business incentives for industry to address security.”
In terms of supply chain diversification and open RAN, one approach would be to “address supply chain concerns by driving the industry toward a more interoperable, modular network design that will foster competition between suppliers and lower barriers to entry for new entrants in the marketplace.” The company said the shift to software-defined networking, including open RAN, “presents a particularly important opportunity for the United States…U.S. leadership on 5G should align, however, with the industry’s phased approach to 5G deployment, helping to sustain and encourage competition among existing suppliers in the near-term, while encouraging the longer-term transition to Open RAN and open and interoperable 5G networks.”
Verizon pretty well spells out its position in a sub-heading of its filing with NTIA: “Open RAN Holds Promise, But Is Not By Itself Sufficient to Promote Diversity and Competition in the Vendor Market.” The company acknowledges, “Carriers need a robust set of competitive options to choose from in the trusted vendor market, and standards-based open and interoperable RAN can help provide those options…But we urge policymakers not to rely solely on the promise of open RAN. The strategic imperative of achieving greater supplier diversity will not be solved by open RAN alone in the face of the strategic government support enjoyed by untrusted suppliers. Policy efforts to advance open RAN must also be accompanied by parallel efforts to enable a more robust and competitive supplier ecosystem both in the United States and globally.”
AT&T and Verizon are both members of the O-RAN Alliance and the Open RAN Policy Coalition. T-Mobile US does participate in the technical industry group but not in the policy-focused consortium. In terms of how T-Mobile sees open RAN fitting into a national strategy for 5G security, it apparently doesn’t as the phrase doesn’t appear in T-Mo’s filing with NTIA.
Editor’s note: The NTIA filings submitted in response to the call for input on the National Strategy to Secure 5G contain multitudes. Expect more coverage incorporating commentary from a wide range of hardware and software vendors.
