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Pentagon Wants Open-Source 5G Plan in Campaign Against Huawei (ft.com) 64

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
The Pentagon is urging US telecoms equipment makers to join forces on 5G technology in a drive to offer a homegrown alternative to China's Huawei. From a report: Lisa Porter, who oversees research and development at the defence department, has asked US companies to develop open-source 5G software -- in effect opening up their technology to potential rivals -- warning they risk becoming obsolete if they do not. Making 5G tech open-source could threaten American companies such as Cisco or Oracle, the biggest American suppliers of telecoms network equipment. This technology -- known as open radio access networks -- would allow telecoms carriers to buy off-the-shelf hardware from a range of vendors, rather than bespoke systems. US officials hope it will provide an alternative to Huawei. The Chinese equipment maker dominates the market, but many in Washington believe it poses a threat to US national security.
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Pentagon Wants Open-Source 5G Plan in Campaign Against Huawei More

Pentagon Wants Open-Source 5G Plan in Campaign Against Huawei

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  • The article isn't even openly available (Score:3, Insightful)

    by craighansen ( 744648 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @09:07PM (#59556994) Journal

    Promoting open-source technology in a closed publication? Can we start by questioning that logic?

  • most of the RAN is passive with only a certain amount (steering etc) active and are done on ASIC or FPGA the rest relies on standard compute which intel owns a lot of... its not complex but requires a lot of testing and tweaking because its analogue

    they could just do a SDR with open source design for the antenna themselves although Nokia and Ericsson would not be happy at all...

  • The only hope we have for faster progress, and better security in wireless tech - not just 5g but wifi 6 - and to compete with china - is to demand the binary blobs at the base of it all, controlled by these companes, be *opened up*, at the very least, to universities, and preferably the world. http://www.taht.net/~d/fcc_san... [taht.net] Now if the pentagon can score a meeting with the FCC to explain this, is another question
    • The Pentagon has people who are good at "getting past the front door and finding people". It's not a question of ability, it's a qustion of desire.

  • Doing good and smart things for stupid reasons! Good enough for me!

  • I'm still baffled by who is pushing this 5G shit because it sure as shit isn't consumer demand.

    Besides, it would be a far easier bet to simply announce it's been determined to be security risk because the protocol is inherently flawed (which is it).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Go full Bell?
      Gov optical to every US home that has a permit as a "home" for humans?
      Pay the private sector to connect every US home in the USA with optical?
      That only connects homes. Not much use for the FBI...

      Get new must have cell towers covering most of the USA...
      Now the FBI has a smartphone with real bandwidth up and down per user/criminal.
      That is why the US gov is pushing new cell towers and bandwidth for smartphones.
      More trendy criminals who carry a new generation of amazing smartphone with

    • 1. Politicians and government leaders: Why because it is easy bragging rights. Our Area has faster wireless then your area, so I am a better leader then you.

      2. Tel-co: Our networks is newer and faster then the competitors network. So our company is better then yours is.

      3. Device Makers: Our newest products support this newest technology, while other companies do not. So our product is better then the others.

      That is actually the reason why there isn't much effort into making an open source product. While g

    • Hardware prices drop when the patents expire. People don't buy a new cellphone if their current phone works, unless it has new stuff they want.

  • Flash-forward: buyer's remorse. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:24PM (#59557222)

    Honestly, if the protocol was actually open-source then there is a near certainty that absolutely everything would be encrypted. I can quickly see all the intelligence agencies scrambling to prevent that.

    • 5G is a protocol, not source code. As it is a published standard, it is already open. A simple google search will lead you to available downloads for the standard.

      • Specifications can still be closed. Just look at USB, you have to pay to get access to the latest spec.

        • Pretty much any industrial standard costs money. It covers the cost for the standardization organisations to maintain and publish.

          As anybody can get access to it for a nominal amount of money, it is for all practical purposes open.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • And Standard isn't even Imperial. Not even the correct country. You don't even know what the different measuring systems are called, how can you possibly think you're going to be the person to unify them?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • You are confusing two different problems here. Having the imperial measurement system in parallel to metric is annoying, but it does not get in the way of open sourcing things. Or setting standards for new telecom equipment.
      Even if there are specific measurements in a standard, they can easily be converted to the other system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The problem is that metric is better for consistency, but the inch-second-pound systems is better for human scale measurements. If I don't have a handy ruler, my thumb is a useful surrogate...it just isn't quite the same size as your thumb, so consistency is a problem. But I don't have any ready access the the "standard Kilogram" and if I did, it would require a good balance to use. But I can always heft my dog, and decide whether or not she's putting on weight.

      The "official foot" is already defined in t

      • I use both US Customary and metric, and for many things I prefer US Customary units. Metric tends to be either too coarse or too fine. You go from mm to cm and then to meters. I'd rather see something as 24 inches than 609.6 mm or 60.96 cm. And you often see small measurements as something like 3.4mm... seriously? 0.4 mm? In this regard, having rules with small increments like 64ths of an inch is much easier to use. I'm a guitar maker, and as such I often have to use both systems. It's not a big deal, and
    • Corporations spend a lot of money to convince people they MUST spend all their money to "keep up with the joneses". Politicians support this because it keeps the economy spinning and makes the corporate doners happy. People could live in sparsely furnished small apartments surrounded by green space, connected by electric light rail.

  • LOL fight the Capitalists (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:54PM (#59557308)
    Fight the Capitalist Chinese, by turning American telco's Socialist/Communist. gotta laugh.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by schnell ( 163007 )

      The Chinese equipment maker dominates the market,

      The whole thing is based on a misleading-at-best premise. Huawei doesn't "dominate" 5G in the US at all in terms of deployments. That's because the "big four" carriers in the US are all using Ericsson/Nokia gear. Ericsson and Nokia charge premium prices, but they are absolutely the gold standard and any carrier that needs to scale nationwide is going to go with them.

      Where Huawei has a large market share is in small local/rural carriers, private networks and the like where they don't have the money to buy th

      • The whole thing is based on a misleading-at-best premise. Huawei doesn't "dominate" 5G in the US at all in terms of deployments.

        You seem to have missed the whole 'ban Huawei' step and gone straight to USA #1

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Well, I'm in favor of things to strengthen the US, just not of strengthening it's government. Actually, if a few problem of motivation can be fixed, I'd even be in favor of strengthening the government. But "ban Huawei" is not a good argument. It *may* be a component of a good approach, but it sure isn't a good approach itself.

          FWIW, I'd be in favor of the code being Free Software, but I consider Open Source to be a best a step mitigating against the worst abuses. Particularly when it's tied into the har

  • You can buy 4G/5G base station software already (Score:3)

    by Jimbookis ( 517778 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @12:11AM (#59557414)
    I was looking at Fabrice Bellard's little company site the other day which sells 4G and 5G software to run on SDRs and PCs. https://www.amarisoft.com/ [amarisoft.com] SDR makes the barriers to entry for this stuff very low. Not quite open source yet but the big companies aren't the only games in town.
  • The us has fallen behind so now 5g must be outsourced, huwai is the big satan, the sky is falling.
    • When cellphones first came out America ruled the market. Now they aren't even in the race. America didn't just export their manufacturing to China, they gave away their science and technology.
  • 5G is a well documented standard, so creating the software needed on 5G access points software should not even be an issue (5G is already in consumer equipment...).

    There are a few other issues which are the real challenges for any company entering the market:

    First and foremost: Patents. All the cellular technology is based on a high number of patents owner by the various companies. For the big ones (Huawai, Ericsson, Cisco...) they have patents to trade, so the direct cost per device is not high. For ot
    • No phone manufacturer can buy a moden chip and not pay for the required binary blob. until Huawei wrote its own toolset. Its really not much more than a modified AT command set, with setup registries for various countries and spectrum holders. And crippled. Extra frequency bands are a cost you more extra, as international travellers well know,.You do not want the end-user to know his/her call was dropped because of congestion, or get wind of a stingray. Like any 3rd year CS practical project, Huawei has pe
  • Sure. Open-source the code. Huawei will just ensure their backdoor code is baked right into the hardware itself, where no one can see it or do anything about it.
  • Send all USA manufacturing off-shore because PROFIT! Then the Chinese implement the next generation, but we're told we can't trust it because JHINA! And maybe there's truth to that, hard to be sure. And now they want us to spontaneously re-develop all of the 5G suite into open source so we don't have to buy from China?

    ROFL!

    Yeah, give me half an hour with Javascript and I'll have that puppy ready to roll. /s

    Personally, I think 5G is mostly a joke. The coverage because of its operating frequency

    • To be fair, 5G on low and mid bands is a fine upgrade over 4G. A bit higher bandwidth, a bit lower latency. But we're talking maybe 20% faster. It's worth doing, but nothing to write home about. All the hype is about mmWave, which most people will rarely or never get. 5G is real technology, but for most people it's a boring technology, just an incremental improvement over what they have right now.

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