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Germany will allow Huawei to develop part of its 5G network, the Handelsblatt business daily reported last week after consulting a new bill that Angela Merkel’s government will submit to the Bundestag next month.
Japan and South Korea politely but firmly refused to exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant from their networks in October. Among the world’s major economies, only the US, UK, India and Taiwan are planning to block Huawei 5G equipment.
Huawei now has the inside track in the race to develop “Fourth Industrial Revolution” applications that harness the capabilities of 5G, including automatically programmed industrial robots, remote-controlled mining, “smart city” traffic management. », Telemedicine and pandemic control.
For example, Huawei plans to add the digitized medical histories and real-time health monitoring of half a billion people outside of China to its cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems during the 2020s. In addition, China’s dominance in 5G gives it a head start in the development of 6G broadband in the next phase.
The German decision not to block a particular equipment supplier from its 5G build was widely expected after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the US presidential election. Biden advisers have said in the past that it is unrealistic to try to exclude billions of Huawei users from global communications networks.
A recent report titled “Meeting the Challenge of China: A New US Strategy for Technology Competition” from the Asia Society and the University of Southern California, said: “Although a ban on Huawei is possible in some key countries, especially allies and partners, this is a global networking challenge that requires multifaceted solutions. Since Chinese components, user terminals and software will be mixed up among the billions of connected 5G end users around the world, a total ban on the global market from Huawei and other Chinese suppliers is impractical.
Some of the report’s authors are potential officials in the Biden administration.
Japanese media reported in mid-October that Tokyo had rejected US requests to exclude Huawei from its 5G network and told Washington that it would take its own security measures to ensure the safety of data transmitted through Huawei hardware. .
South Korean news agency Yonhap said a senior South Korean official told a high-level US delegation: “We have made it clear that if a private telecommunications company uses equipment from a specific company , it’s up to this company to decide.
“Russian 5G will be made in China,” Russian business daily Kommersant reported in September after Russian mobile provider MTS switched from Nokia to Huawei to upgrade Moscow’s mobile network. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Xi Jinping signed a framework agreement on 5G cooperation, including for joint research and development, at the 2019 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
Excluding Huawei’s 5G equipment from Germany would have caused major disruption as new 5G networks need to be integrated with existing 4G equipment. Huawei represents 65% of the 4G infrastructure of Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s leading mobile service provider, as well as 55% of Vodaphone equipment and 50% of Telefonica’s equipment.
Earlier this month, German officials described the Huawei decision as a cliffhanger, as German industrial lobbyists argued with German security officials who were reluctant to take the wrath of the U.S. intelligence community. Trump’s loss at the polls appears to have tipped the scales in favor of the industry lobby, which wants to work with China.
In Sweden, where Huawei’s biggest competitor Ericsson is located, the national telecommunications regulator postponed an auction of 5G spectrum after a Swedish appeals court granted Huawei’s petition to reconsider the ban by the government to use its broadband equipment.
Ericsson himself criticized the government ban. China is one of Ericsson’s largest markets, and the company’s largest and most modern production plant opened in Nanjing last year. Ericsson is expected to build up to 10% of China’s vast 5G network, with 10 million base stations in place by 2024.
One of China’s selling points in the competition to build 5G is that Beijing has already started developing next-generation, or 6G, broadband. In November, China launched the first 6G experimental satellite, testing data transmission at Terahertz (extremely short) wavelengths. Researchers have discussed using Terahertz radiation as a broadband mobile platform, but the Chinese satellite’s launch is the first experimental test in space.
During an Asia Times webinar in November, I interviewed industry expert Dr Handel Jones about the prospects for 6G. Jones, president of International Business Services, a consulting firm, said, “China has at least two or three programs in terms of 6G. It’s a ten-year program, and it will potentially be ten times or a hundred times larger than 5G. Quantum communications is one of the options, and China already has a link with quantum communications between Shanghai and Beijing. Obviously, the United States should switch to 6G. “
“But who’s going to do it?” Jones added. “We don’t have a company in the United States that currently uses 5G. We have part of the infrastructure but not the base stations, not the optical fiber, so overall we have Huawei and ZTE in China; in Europe we have Ericsson and Nokia. Samsung is coming and could be a force in this market in the future. Technology in Japan too. But in the United States, we don’t have a company that is even 5G. “
The United States appears likely to adopt the so-called “open radio access network” and “virtualized radio access network” approach, which eschews dedicated 5G base stations with custom-designed chips in favor of ‘cheap generic hardware powered by complex software.
The quoted “China Challenge” report recommended: “The United States should not attempt to win a race between Huawei and a new US national champion. Instead, the United States should adopt a forward-looking strategy to enable a variety of new entrants to successfully enter the 5G innovation space. This strategy would reduce the dependence on a single equipment supplier for the entire 5G network by facilitating the emergence of open and modular architectures such as ORAN or vRAN. “
ORAN / vRan requires the creation of billions of lines of computer code which must then be tested and retested in real conditions. It is not known whether this approach will work or how much it will cost. By the time the code is written and the new network is tested, furthermore, China will have built its nationwide network of 10 million base stations and will likely be well advanced in new applications.
This combination of sophisticated software and generic hardware is sometimes presented as a “6G” response to Huawei’s dominance in 5G. This is misleading because using extremely short wavelengths to transmit data requires the solution of physics problems that researchers are only beginning to understand. And using open networks involving a wide variety of hardware and equipment vendors could create a network security nightmare, according to Ericsson.
Jason Boswell, Head of Security for Ericsson’s Networks Division, warned last month: “As the industry moves towards RAN virtualization, with 3GPP or O-RAN, it is important that a risks is adopted to adequately address the security risks. Secure Open RAN systems may require additional security measures that are not yet fully considered. Ericsson quietly left the industry group promoting ORAN / vRan earlier this year.
US tech companies abandoned the hardware industry after the March 2000 stock market crash and focused almost exclusively on software. The “software solution” is suitable for companies primarily engaged in coding software, but America is unlikely to outpace China and its growing network of industrial partners.
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