This is great news if they truly go through with open spec hardware and open source 5G firmware, it would be a seismic shift in how cellular modems have been rolled out in the last 30 years.
Truly couldn't care less if it is driven by Europe or China having better tech or whatever geopolitical flavour of the minute caused such things, I would 100% support a US effort if the went down an open source path, where can I sign up to donate development effort? The most widespread bastion of closed source binary blobs left on the planet with no alternatives is cellular baseband firmware. Anyone breaking down those walls should be congratulated regardless of the reasons.
If you are interested in these things don't be put off by the kneejerk comments here, it's fertile land, there are devs who have worked for years on open source cellular modem software and poured significant money/energy into such endeavours knowing they could never realistically get their work approved by regulators anywhere on Earth.
Have some links, honestly surprised many people in 2nd one haven't been arrested. This is a highly regulated space and they've caused a tad bit of trouble over the years for simply trying to be free.
"...The 5G Challenge would leverage the innovative capabilities of the software development and telecommunications technology communities to enable more open implementations of 5G systems, including end-user equipment, the radio access network, and the core network, with a focus on the 5G protocol stack software. "
How about:
"We want to run a game with a big reward. A game that gets people to come up with the most innovative, clever, secure, resilient ways to use 5G for our military that we haven't seen before.
Do you have ideas for how 5G can be implemented in open hardware or software? Do you have ideas for how we can structure a game and its reward to achieve something like that?
Let us know if you have ideas, and you may be able to be a part of something big."
We are behind in the game and we don't have anyone capable in this sphere. Nokia, Erikson, Huawey, and Samsung have all the market now and we need american presence there. We can't create a state company, so we will try to break the leaders either by sanctions or by diminishing the value of their IP through open standards until the moment when the standards are open enough to favorite our proprietary IP using them.
While the 3GPP Profile and Spec aren't exactly "Open" by Open Source and HN's Standard, It is definitely not closed or proprietary. You can implement a working 3G / 4G / 5G system. It just wouldn't be competitive with commercial offering.
And US actually has plenty of IP via Qualcomm in Core Standards. Ignoring IoT and AV ( Autonomous Vehicle ). Also partly via Nokia when acquired Alcatel-Lucent, where Lucent is from AT&T Bell Labs.
So No, US aren't out of the 5G circle. They just dont have any companies making specific part of the 5G infrastructure.
We fell down on basic R&D: most of the labs got wiped out by "cost accounting" and short term profit seeking.
We fell down on basic infrastructure: much of the country isn't gigabit, let alone DSL.
We fell down on basic STEM education. Other countries pay for everyone's education as an investment in the future.
We fell down retaining existing leadership areas, offshoring them for short term profit. Now we can't make some of these things and need to buy them back with import tariffs.
Who could have forseen this coming?
Sorry, but I just had to. This is likely the exact scenario. Well put.
Infantilizing is what 'Frondo refers to, "ninja rock stars" job descriptions. What they have in common with business jargon is using a lot of words to communicate near-zero actual content. They use language to press emotional buttons in the audience to create a desired atmosphere (importance and fun, respectively).
I think GP did a really good job, and I prefer their take.
Having worked in this space, a company bidding here will not be able to do this without spending billions on implementing and being part of the non-military commercial market (and paying commercial rates for engineers to build it). It took commercial vendors nearly a decade to build 5G and the only reason they were so "fast" was because they had already experienced engineers on their payroll who understood the basics of 3G/4G.
if they accept bids it would be more realistic to just focus on a MIL spec equivalent documents of 3GPP specs and then have the Nokia or Ericsson sites in the US build it for them. Even they do this there is still the "Outsourced elephant in the room":
"5G: The outsourced elephant in the room" https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
If they're really serious about natsec the only way forward would be a complete isolation for the military network.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/1aa61918-48fc-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
100% agree. Also, many of the large domain players (Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE) actively participated in the 3GPP standards process to ensure they were kept abreast of what was being proposed. This is a pretty steep hill to climb for the US to build out a competitive domestic solution.
Meanwhile our nation's cellular networks still run fantastically unsecure SS7, is my understanding.
Some kind of neat undertones of Secret History of Silicon Valley[1] here, except it's a different kind of protection, a different kind of guard for the world: not against military adversaries, but against our own inability to connect ourselves amid the software-run world.
5G has even bigger implications on defense outside the small niche (of MIL spec) smart-phones. The risks are massive for a military to rely on such a consumer-grade tech. But never mind bug/back-doors Trusting foreign (multinational) vendors with this (no matter how friendly) will never work because the trust assumption beneath is already flawed.
Edit: Looking at it from a EU perspective: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
"> Just to let that sink in, Huawei (and their close partners) already run and directly operate the mobile telecommunication infrastructure for over 100 million European subscribers."
It is possible to have all military traffic either terminate at the edge of the military (for example a 5G installation at an army camp) or use a dedicated slice (fully isolated from the normal user traffic) to reach a trusted cloud. Usually, they use both at the same time, so if the connection to the trusted cloud is lost, you rely on the edge cloud.
As far as I know, NATO has several such projects.
Public, notably 4G infrastructures, have been used as underlying networks for day to day military and security activity. The overlay network itself is still encrypted and resilient by using other networks if public network is not available.
With 5G, it even accelerates. Therefore it justifies part of the ban of Huawei and the security needed for 5G networks.
So this program does not look so astonishing.
Seems like they might be trying to spin this "Challenge" as a sort of AES-style competition, but merely requesting comments en masse seems like it will go the way of the Net Neutrality comments on the FCC site - lots of spam drowning out legitimate input, leading to powerful entities feeling justified in ignoring all submissions.
In the top right corner is a button marked "SUBMIT A FORMAL COMMENT." I assume that sending an email is treated identically to submitting a formal comment.
Here's more information about the rulemaking process: https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...
Of course it would be good if the telecom infrastructure were open, secure, and auditable. But there are some barriers:
You cannot make communications secure AND enable interception. You are required to provide undetectable (even to network management systems)interception for (IIRC) 1% of traffic. This has to be controlled from an off-site LI console at law enforcement agencies.
And that's just the tip of the surveillance iceberg.
There are parts of a 5G system that could be open source, like most of the RAN, since LI happens in the mobile switching center. But for these parts of the network, the equipment providers could just be required to make their code public and audit it. Possibly needs patent suit protection, but that would get you there fastest.
As others on this thread have pointed out the whole telecom gear game is wildly unsuited for open systems for a whole bunch of other reasons.
>We are behind in the game and we don't have anyone capable in this sphere. Nokia, Erikson, Huawey, and Samsung have all the market now and we need american presence there. We can't create a state company, so we will try to break the leaders either by sanctions or by diminishing the value of their IP through open standards until the moment when the standards are open enough to favorite our proprietary IP using them.
>Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory),[6][7] its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[8][9]
What was the first attempt at a large scale computer network?
>In 1959, Anatolii Ivanovich Kitov proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a detailed plan for the re-organisation of the control of the Soviet armed forces and of the Soviet economy on the basis of a network of computing centres, the OGAS.[6]
States have always had a strong strategic interest in ensuring they have access and control of critical technology of the time for purposes of power projection.
It's less about "the economy" than ensuring influence over strategically critical tech.
Americans always play weird games with the truth, what they think you'll allow them to get away with when they lie straight to your face.
1. Hard to create your own cell network (in contrast to a wifi or ethernet network).
2. Limited choice on vendors (again, in contrast to wifi and ethernet).
5G's potential ubiquity and utility, but limited vendors, is an issue for the DoD. They want to use it, but if they can't build out their own 5G infrastructure reliably with a decent variety of vendors it's a no-go.
