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 blazingly fast 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 entangled, 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 a continuing 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, which is arguably China’s largest tech company and has 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 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.
Collaboration
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 wider range of wireless spectrum, as well as offering high-precision positioning, vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, and more. Reliable, virtually 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.
“The United States wrote 4G,” says Charles Clancy, vice president of intelligence programs at MITER, a nonprofit organization that manages American research projects. “Meanwhile, through government subsidies and cyber theft of competitors’ intellectual property, Huawei became the world leader while no one was watching,” says Clancy, who studied 5G security. “They gradually took control of the standards groups, and China wrote 5G.” Huawei declined to comment.
It remains difficult to gauge how much China will gain from its role in shaping standards, or how much the United States will lose. Defining technical standards can give hardware manufacturers an advantage in developing products that use the standards. Huawei has also been accused of making its hardware difficult to combine with other equipment. A November report from the Center for New American Security warns that 5G promises to have such broad uses that the United States could suffer economically and militarily if it allows China to move too far.
Competition
However, competition can be tricky. Last month, the U.S. government clarified a rule that allowed U.S. companies to work with Huawei on technical standards, after earlier versions apparently caused U.S. companies to reduce their participation in standards development.
Despite the complexities, many countries are aligning with the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared last week that the “trend is changing against Huawei” and praised “clean telecommunications companies” in India, France, Australia, South Korea and the United Kingdom that are rejecting the technology of the Chinese company. On the same day, the Singapore government chose Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland, instead of Huawei, to install its national 5G network.
Some countries seem interested in taking advantage of the divide between the United States and China. A day after Singapore made its choice, Japan’s dominant telco, NTT Docomo, took a 5 percent stake in hardware maker NEC, and the companies outlined plans to compete globally in 5G. The Japanese government has also signaled plans to boost a Japanese version of the technology.
5G has inspired new coalitions between nations, including the D-10, a coalition of democratic nations proposed by the United Kingdom that would collaborate on technologies such as 5G, as well as global supply chains.
Samm Sacks, a cyber security policy and a member of China’s digital economy in New America, notes that the United States is increasingly taking a more offensive approach to compete with China in areas such as artificial intelligence, chip development, and 5G by proposing more investments in chip manufacturing technology and Promote open communication standards.
This story first appeared on wired.com.
