Pompeo Gives ORAN a Push as All FCC Members Discuss the Tech

“The Chinese Communist Party is leveraging its technological prowess to erode freedom and democracy at home and around the world,” Pompeo said: The U.S. "has called on our allies and partners in government and industry to help us protect people's freedoms and data.” Pompeo said the FCC was right to clear as much spectrum as quickly as possible for 5G, and open networks have a role. The world doesn’t want “China's communists hacking into self-driving cars or their home appliances, their medical tools,” he said. In February, Attorney General William Barr said the ORAN is “pie in the sky” (see 2006020064).

Jessica Rosenworcel said she has been pushing the importance of ORAN for more than a year, before any other commissioner. Getting 5G right requires “putting security first” and “recognizing that this new connectivity brings with it a whole lot of vulnerabilities,” she said. ORAN would push the market to where the U.S. is strongest, in software and semiconductors, she said.

The FCC’s focus has been on restricting use of network equipment from China, Rosenworcel said. “We shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security by flashy and well-promoted decisions about hardware and administration headlines about Huawei and ZTE,” she said. “Not everyone is convinced,” she added, noting Barr's comments. ORAN requires investment by the government and private sector, she said.

“Traditionally, wireless networks rely on a closed architecture in which a single vendor supplies many or all the components between network base stations and the core,” Pai said. “Open RANs can fundamentally disrupt this marketplace. We could see an exponential growth in the number and diversity of suppliers. We could see more cost-effective solutions. And critically, we could see the keys to security in the hands of network operators.” It’s difficult to predict how the market will evolve, Pai said. “Innovation and competition make for a stronger, healthier telecom ecosystem.”

ORAN “will really open the door for a tremendous amount of hardware innovation,” said Sachin Katti, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University and adviser to VMware. “When we virtualize, we are now able to run a variety of different hardware underneath and run the radio network as essentially an app,” he said. “This plays to American strengths.” Katti cited U.S. innovation in the cloud and artificial intelligence and the “mushrooming of startups.” The same will happen with networks, he said. “We can virtualize it. No one has to worry about what the underlying hardware is.”

ORAN takes advantage of new technologies such as network function virtualization and software-defined networks and allows new flexibility, said Caroline Chan, general manager of Intel Network Platform Group's 5G infrastructure division. Today, you have several “flavors” of networks, she said. There are traditional networks, virtualized networks and “you will have the open RAN under ORAN specifications,” she said.

Rakuten, which is building a wireless network in Japan, looked at Huawei as its vendor but didn’t want to take the associated risks, said Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin. Instead, it’s building an ORAN, working with companies including Qualcomm, Intel and Cisco. “We realized the United States contained all the necessary ingredients,” he said. “You just need the right, for lack of better word, shift, to put these things together,” he said. “We have realized quickly the benefits and advantages of such an architecture, but because of its simplicity, our ability to roll services and agility to deliver is unparalleled.” The carrier has more than 6,700 macro base stations and plans 70% market coverage in March, he said.

Dish Network is fully in wireless, said Stephen Bye, executive vice president for its wireless business. “A lot of things we see unfolding around cloud-native networking are really vital to unlocking the potential that ORAN provides,” he said: ORAN “is an important step, but one step, and it is really this cloud-native capability and the open environment that really is important.” As Dish builds its network, ORAN gives it more visibility into how components from different vendors are working, he said. ORAN means better security, Bye said. “It’s a lot easier to find the cockroaches when the light is on than fumbling around in the dark.”

ORAN “allows us to open up the interfaces between the various components of the radio access network and really shift to a more modular network, with different components and software sourced from different suppliers,” said Laurie Bigler, assistant vice president at AT&T Labs Research. "5G is really the perfect time to start thinking about openness, to help foster innovation in the ecosystem.”

ORAN company Mavenir counts 19 companies in the market, said John Baker, senior vice president-business development. “People are really buying into the vision of, ‘I've got a market opportunity and I’m going to invest.’”

U.S. carriers have been left without a viable domestic option for buying network gear, said Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “Chinese government support artificially lowered Huawei and ZTE’s prices,” Starks said. “This was not free-market competition but part of a strategy to leverage economic power into geopolitical dominance.” Chinese gear “has become pervasive around the world,” he said.

Commissioner Brendan Carr drew the analogy to the PC market in the 1980s, when IBM “was dominant … in a way that was completely vertically integrated.” That meant clunky computers almost no one could afford, he said. Microsoft unbundled the market, separating hardware from the operating system and software, he said. “It dramatically drove down the cost of laptops and enabled competitors to enter, from Dell to Gateway.” Consumers could afford computers, which led to the widespread use of the internet in the 1990s, Carr said.

ORAN “provides one path of potentially minimizing exposure points,” said Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. “ORAN can reduce threats to overall network security, if done properly.”