Biden Administration Focused on Overcoming ORAN Hesitancy: White House Official

Keeping American telecom networks secure and competitive with Chinese companies that receive substantial subsidiaries from the government is a top priority of the Biden administration, said Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser-cyber and emerging tech, at the Winnik Forum at Hogan Lovells Thursday. Neuberger said the administration is committed to promoting open radio access networks as a way of leveling the playing field with China.

Neuberger said she spent almost 15 years in intelligence “and it impressed on me the role of global telecommunications in national security.” The networks the U.S. deploys “truly are the foundation, not only of our national security but also of the next generations of applications in this space.” Neuberger said she has been particularly focused on ORAN's security advantages.

“What we know is that we must ensure that trusted vendors can be an economically viable option” in the face of subsidies from China, Neuberger said. She noted “trust” can come at a high cost, particularly in developing nations where people “very much want trusted vendors and trusted telecom” but can’t afford to pay “double the price” of equipment from China.

When the National Security Council learns of 5G auctions around the world it works to ensure that trusted vendors are able to compete, Neuberger said. The administration has been “laser-focused” on promoting and persuading allies to use only “trusted” vendors, she said. The administration has “had some success,” but it’s clear that vendors not subsidized by their government are having a hard time competing “with untrusted vendors who are,” she said.

ORAN takes advantage of software, which has driven down costs in many sectors, Neuberger said. The administration is “fully aware that an open-standards, interoperable approach is very likely to bring down costs significantly and offer a more long-term, economically viable option,” she said: “Fortunately, open RAN has gained more and more credibility. … We believe that it is a rather key moment in time because these recent deployments that have occurred serve as proof points for the scale, robustness and viability” of ORAN.

Security will be one of ORAN’s benefits and “we need additional security processes for open RAN and to demonstrate security benefits,” Neuberger said. Companies and organizations need to develop a common framework for managing software patch updates, she said. DOD has begun the process of analyzing the benefits of ORAN over closed networks “and I’m confident that this effort will be successful,” she said.

Carriers have tens or hundreds of millions of customers who have come to expect a high level of performance and reliability, and they’re “hesitant to risk their business on a relatively new approach,” Neuberger said. That’s why ORAN has made “incredible strides” with large greenfield deployments, but “we’ve yet to see a deployment of open RAN in a brownfield network at scale,” she said. Providers need to feel confident before they overhaul their networks and “I would like to hear more ideas on how we gain the confidence,” she said.

Dish Committed

When Dish Network decided to build a 5G network in 2018 it knew that to compete with the big carriers it needed to build something “cheaper, faster and better,” said Jeff Blum, executive vice president-external and legislative affairs. Dish decided to go with ORAN for all the benefits cited by Neuberger, he said. ORAN is flexible, software-based, cheaper and “modern,” he said.

Congress and the administration have done a good job of “leaping on” ORAN through speeches, by bringing government and industry together and programs like the $1.5 billion in grants for ORAN development (see 2209060052) funded by the Chips and Science Act, Blum said. “That gave companies like Dish, and all of our vendors, confidence that we’re doing something supported by the U.S. government, and we’re doing something special,” he said. Dish is working with about 90 partners on its 5G network, he said.

Launching a network has been “much harder than we thought it would be,” but now the technology is in place and Dish has more than 15,000 towers, Blum said. “The network is the first 100% stand-alone, 5G, virtualized, cloud-native network in the world,” he said. Dish is on the way to covering more than 230 million POPs by June 14, he said.

AT&T is still looking at ORAN, and the question is “when not if,” said Chris Boyer, AT&T vice president-global security and technology policy. “ORAN is something that’s going to happen; it’s just a matter of time for us,” he said. Part of the challenge is AT&T has a “highly complex network of multiple spectrum bands and generations [of wireless] that we’re trying to support,” he said.

AT&T is “trying to balance” its C-band build and 5G deployment while “also making sure that we are future proofing the network and investing in things like open RAN,” Boyer said: “There’s a lot of balancing that’s going on inside of AT&T right now.” AT&T’s focus is on making sure that gear used is capable of supporting ORAN specifications “down the road,” he said. “That’s really important for us because what we’re looking for is basically insertion points” for when AT&T has “the confidence” to deploy ORAN, he said.

ORAN is allowing Vodafone to add “greater resilience to its supply chain” by working with more and more diverse suppliers, said Nikoleta Patroni, ORAN senior engineer at Vodafone. ORAN allows providers to focus on making networks more energy efficient and to better optimize its assets, she said: “In general, it acts as a catalyst for innovation. Competition breeds innovation.” Vodafone’s goal is to have 30% of its mobile networks in Europe open by 2030, she said.

Winnik Forum Notebook

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said national security is more than arms and “really is who wins the technology battle in a series of domains, wireless being one of them.” The Chinese Communist Party “is not playing for second place,” but there are few policymakers in Washington who even know what ORAN is, he said. “We need more than greenfields,” he said: “We need our incumbents to think about brownfield deployments. We need more test beds. We need additional spectrum.” Warner, a wireless industry veteran, said it got his attention when Huawei became “the leading force” in the industry “and there was no price-competitive” alternative. “We also saw China flooding the zone on the standards setting bodies,” he said. “We need to make sure that we don’t lose the standards battle,” he said: “We really need to push real ORAN, not proprietary ORAN that simply endorses an existing system under a different name.” Warner said the $1.5 billion in the Chips Act needs to be spent on ORAN deployment “and not simply cyber training under a different name.”