The US, with some (perhaps reluctant) agreement among allies, wants to bar Chinese supervendor Huawei from 5G buildouts for security reasons. US Attorney General Barr has proposed that the US take a stake in Nokia and/or Ericsson as a counter to Huawei and a means of reducing the cost impact on operators of dropping Huawei.
Leaving aside the question of whether the security fears are justified, is something like this a good approach? There are two pieces to that question. First, would a direct government investment in a competitive telecom vendor be a good idea, or even feasible? Second, would beefing up a competitor be the right approach even if it could be followed?
As for the first point, it’s hard not to see some serious contradictions in play. The contention that Huawei is an agent of the Chinese government, in effect, and as such capable of introducing trap doors into hardware that would compromise national security, has been denied. Everyone has to decide whether they believe that denial is credible, but if the US and other governments were to take a controlling stake in telecom vendors, would that not raise the same concerns about trap doors and compromised security?
We can’t assume that our own conviction that we’d never do something like that would be any more convincing to other countries than China’s and Huawei’s denials. That would mean that the strategy would immediately be at risk because some would see it as simply substituting one risk for another. I think this would make it hard to sell the strategy, and the products that came out of it.
Then there’s the question of whether it would work. What are we trying to do here, after all? Cut costs for network equipment to the rough level of Huawei’s own price-leader levels. How does that happen with Nokia and Ericsson being controlled by governments? Do they subsidize the products with tax dollars? Can they believe that governments could run a private company more efficiently than commercial management?
Let’s paraphrase a quote from a former Supreme Court Justice: “If Columbus had turned his voyaging plans over to government, he’d still be at the dock.” Look at government processes today, and tell me with a straight face that they can even make a useful decision promptly, much less a highly competitive one.
Finally, there’s the question of how the government(s) acquire controlling interest? Do they nationalize? That’s tough given the multi-national nature of the companies involved. Do they buy in? With what? Tax dollars again? If a “controlling” interest is purchased, what happens to the other 49-and-odd-hundredths percent of the shareholders, now committed to perhaps selling products at a lower margin?
I don’t think there’s any possible way that having governments buy into Nokia and Ericsson could do anything other than cement a future role for Huawei, the opposite of the intentions (whether they’re justified or not). Scratch this idea.
The competing notion is that the US would somehow encourage or subsidize initiatives to create an open-model 5G alternative to vendor-proprietary approaches, including Huawei’s. This model would promote a common hardware structure that would then support open-source, portable, code. The presumption is that the combination of commodity hardware and open-source software could drop costs below not only Huawei’s current pricing, but lower than any vendor could follow. Thus, it would solve whatever Huawei problem you believe exists, and also help operators cope with the declining ROI in their infrastructure investment, by lowering the “I” piece.
Despite the fact that this second approach seems at least plausible on the face, there are still issues with the suggestions, arising out of the fact that governments don’t know much about tech. We actually have a lot of the stuff that’s needed to support this open-model 5G approach already, and what’s needed to both complete the model and then support it starts with an understanding of what’s involved, meaning what a solution should look like.
I offer you, for consideration, a poem I wrote decades ago, which I titled “Ode to the Collective”:
Why do I stand here, sightless, like a damn fool,
and try to explain color to another damn fool
who is also sightless?
I’ve attended a lot of meetings in my time, and one thing common to them all has been the difficulty in doing anything useful, created by the inability to harmonize a diversity of views. In the open-model network space, it seems likely to me that collectivism in any form is simply going to delay things, which means that any remedy that’s eventually produced may well be too late.
But that’s not the big problem with having the government “promote” open-model networking through stuff like R&D. Such a move would imply that we don’t have any open-model solutions available, and that’s simply not true.
The best picture we currently have of an open network device can be found either in the Linux Foundation DANOS work, derived from AT&T’s dNOS, or in the ONF’s Stratum and P4. These activities presume that an open network device is something like a commercial server, in that it includes an “operating system and middleware” that are designed to generate a useful interface upward (northbound) to application and service logic, and harmonize variations in hardware via “drivers”. This approach works, as Linux proves, in making software portable across a very wide range of server configurations.
P4 is particularly important here, because P4 is an abstract flow-programming language that supports what’s surely the key mission of a network device, which is to switch packets. The beauty of P4 is that a P4 driver can translate the flow programs to specialized chip commands, supporting a wide variety of custom silicon. That means that an open-model device with specialized chips to accelerate packet handling can still be open at the software level. Add in a standard OS, and you have everything you need…almost.
The key element that’s missing is the radio network piece. We do have an OpenRAN body, and its material at least occasionally references all of the elements I’ve noted above. What seems to me to be missing, is a statement that links either P4-as-it-is or P4-with-proposed-extensions to the RAN mission. If that were provided, we could say that the complete definition of a 5G network in open-model form could be laid out as an almost-clerical task—pulling together references to projects (and in most cases, actual code) already out there…almost.
This second “almost” references our lack of an overall model for mapping 5G functionality to infrastructure. We have an open “device” model ready (a 2018 paper on the topic describes all the elements I’ve cited here), but do we really want continue to compose open-model networks from devices? One thing that NFV did accomplish was to introduce the notion of composing from functions, a common theme in application virtualization, to network services. Yes, it fell down on realizing the goal, but that doesn’t mean we can’t realize it now, and we should.
If there is a significant advance in networking in the last decade, it’s been the concept of virtualization, which is all about abstraction and modeling. The mobile standards groups, like all network standards groups, has been stuck in device-model mud all of that last decade. They conceptualize a virtual network as a network of virtual devices that are used exactly as real devices would have been used. If we get too far down the open-device road, we’re accepting the greatest head-in-the-sand development of a decade, which is that it’s all about devices.
You can sort of see a perception of risks of this sort in a quote from Kudlow, White House economic advisor, in the Wall Street Journal article I linked to earlier. “Dell and Microsoft are now moving very rapidly to develop software and cloud capabilities that will, in fact, replace a lot of the equipment,” Mr. Kudlow said. “To quote Michael Dell, ‘Software is eating the hardware in 5G.’” If “cloud capabilities” are to replace equipment, if “software” is to be “eating the hardware”, then we can’t do open-model 5G by creating nothing more than open-model boxes.
Could “Dell and Microsoft” provide that model? More likely, VMware and Red Hat, or Google. The cloud community is closing in on a function-centric rather than device-centric view of applications, and that vision will apply just as well to services. That tells me that despite the Kudlow quote of Michael Dell above, government is still stuck in hardware, when virtualization is making this into the age of software.
We’ve made tremendous progress in the cloud by not having either standards groups or the government meddle in it. The cloud community has swirled around in the sandbox of market reality, and come up with the “Kubernetes ecosystem”, a set of open-source tools that create and deploy cloud applications. That work will likely eventually address our need for a high-level vision of open-model networking.
It would be nice to advance and refine that vision, of course, and that may not come out of the cloud community because “services” and “applications” aren’t identical, and because the network community has to deal with short-sighted standards that almost mandate a device-model network. We need some network skill to bridge the application-to-services gap. The only company I know of with actual credentials in “function virtualization” is Metaswitch, whose Clearwater IMS project virtualized IMS without getting stuck in box mode. Maybe somebody should ask these guys how to approach the problem.
If the US, or anyone else, wants to promote an alternative to Huawei, or promote open-model 5G for simple return on infrastructure reasons, the way to do it is to require open-model device adherence as a condition of bidding on government network contracts, preferencing operators who commit to open 5G deployment in spectrum auctions, and the like. That would accelerate the innovative thinking already underway.
I think we need open-model networking, period, regardless of what you believe with respect to Huawei and 5G security. My concern is that government measures in the 5G space, aimed at the Huawei issue, could end up not only delaying but actually defeating open-model network advances. Political measures, IMHO, don’t advance technology, and in any case we really need only the issue of the broad “network functions” model to be decided. That should take relatively little time and effort. I’d love to see the industry get on that issue, and the government focus on what it might do to reward open-model advances, rather than trying to guide them.