ORAN Can Help Compete With Huawei on 5G, Ex-Im Event Hears
With an FCC forum on open radio access networks coming Monday (see 2008180012), ORAN dominated discussion during a 5G panel at a U.S. Export-Import Bank virtual conference Thursday. U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien warned against 5G from China.
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The race to 5G is of “vital national” importance to the U.S., said Luke Lindberg, Ex-Im senior vice president-external engagement. “We seek to level the playing field for U.S. firms, allowing them to compete more fairly with foreign competitors, particularly those from China. The dynamic is definitely changing. ... There’s a lot of discussion in Washington about what we can do, from a federal government perspective, to support these U.S. options for 5G rollout.” The concept of ORAN “comes up all the time,” he said.
The U.S. “promotes a journey to self-reliance,” O’Brien said: “Beijing promotes a journey to China dependence. … China seeks to create dependencies that can be exploited to serve geopolitical goals.” China never does anything without asking for something in return, he said. China provided COVID-19 aid to other nations but “demanded market access for Huawei’s 5G,” he said.
U.S. companies can’t compete with Huawei without international partnerships, said Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky. “That’s the most important thing, to work in a multilateral way with our allies to displace Huawei and to displace China’s malign efforts to dominate 5G.” That's important to the economy and national security, he said. Huawei and the Chinese embassy didn’t comment.
Huawei is a “world-class” equipment provider but has been targeted for “geopolitical and political reasons,” said Bob Kerr, Dell Technologies 5G engineering technologist. That’s “definitely opening up new opportunities for Dell and others,” he said. Kerr noted Huawei opposes open networks.
ORAN would mean “the horizontal decomposition of the radio functions with open interfaces between” them, said Bob Everson, Cisco senior director-5G architecture. ORAN would mean more options for providers, he said.
The network core is as important as the RAN, said Phil Mottram, Hewlett Packard Enterprise vice president-communications and media solutions. Ten years later when autonomous vehicles (AVs) are more common, network operators “will want to be able to segment their network so for some parts … they have really great performance that’s uncongested,” he said: Other uses don’t require the same reliability.
ORAN is “opening up the last key part of the network,” Everson said. Some see closed networks as offering better security, he said: “You have hardware that’s vulnerable in there. You have software that’s vulnerable in there and it’s a black box.”
Carriers are making big investments in their networks, but consumers won’t pay more for 5G connections, Mottram said. “The real opportunity to get the return on the investment is to sell new services to enterprise customers” like AVs, he said.
Challenges remain for ORAN, Ericsson said Thursday. “This new approach to RAN architecture may provide future benefits such as lower deployment cost (commoditized hardware) and increased supply chain diversity (more vendors) while potentially increasing network integration costs and complexity,” Ericsson said: “Continued study and further work efforts are required to ensure that security, integrity and resilience of Open RAN architectures are preserved.”