The world came together to build 5G. Now the next generation wireless technology is separating the world.
The latest version of the 5G tech spec, scheduled for Friday, adds features to connect autonomous cars, smart factories, and Internet of Things devices to fast, crazy 5G networks. The plans reflect a global effort to develop the technology, with contributions from more than a dozen companies in Europe, the United States and Asia.
And yet, 5G is also separating nations, with the United States and China anchoring the tug-of-war. Tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade, human rights, the handling of Covid-19 and Chinese disinformation are increasing global divisions around the deployment of 5G. An increasing number of countries are aligning with a western or Chinese version of the technology.
“National security and business interests are tangled, and it is very difficult to separate them,” says Scott Wallsten, president of the Institute for Technology Policy, a group of experts.
The way 5G was created, and the way it is now being implemented, captures an ongoing conundrum for Western countries: how to balance healthy competition and collaboration with national interests and the rise of China.
The 5G dispute centers on Huawei, arguably China’s largest tech company, with a dominant position in networking equipment, a huge smartphone business, and increasingly sophisticated chips. The company is accused of stealing technology and having close ties to the Chinese government that could allow cyber espionage. It has become a symbol of China’s ambitions to master technology, through innovation and by nefarious means.
The United States and some allies, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Taiwan, have banned Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications companies like ZTE from their networks. Other nations have opposed US-led efforts to keep Huawei and other Chinese companies out of the picture. Argentina, Brazil, Russia, the Philippines and Thailand all welcome China’s 5G technology.
A key question is how this fork will affect the performance of a standard that was to be open and global. “We risk further fragmenting the Internet and the way different networks connect to each other,” says Wallsten.
Even if 5G was to be a truly global communications standard, technical plans reflect changing national strengths and resulting tensions.
The 5G standards outline plans for blazing fast wireless speeds of up to 1GB per second, 50 times faster than the average US broadband connection, with few delays. Think about playing high-end games without lags or robots that feed on artificial intelligence hosted in the cloud. And, of course, 5G is expected to inspire innovations and business that can change the technology landscape. According to various estimates, the technology could generate several trillions of dollars for the world economy in the next two decades. Not surprisingly, each country wants a share of the action.
The technical specifications for 5G are developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a coalition of standards organizations from the United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, and South Korea. The group is putting the finishing touches on version 16 of the 5G spec, which will add features that will allow devices to jump between a broader range of wireless spectrum, deliver highly accurate positioning, vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, and more reliability, practically instantaneous. communications, crucial for industrial uses.
Many companies have contributed to the writing of 5G, but the standard reflects a shift from American and European technology to Chinese compared to 4G, the previous standard. An analysis of contributions to 3GPP specifications, published in August 2019 by IHS Markit, found that Chinese companies contributed approximately 59 percent of the standards, with Huawei representing the majority of them. The standards for 4G were led by European and American companies.
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