[HN Gopher] US Government makes $42M bet on open cell networks: ...
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US Government makes $42M bet on open cell networks: Open RAN dream
stays alive
Author : rntn
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-02-12 20:31 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| Miner49er wrote:
| This is at least the second grant given out by the US government
| for this: https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/dish-
| wins-50-million-gra...
| londons_explore wrote:
| * Huawei sells better and cheaper network hardware than anyone
| else.
|
| * The US has previously kept Huawei's market share at bay using
| every political trick in the book, but the US's reach only goes
| so far, and other nations are buying large amounts of Huawei
| hardware, making it even better and cheaper.
|
| * Modern mobile networks work far better if you buy all the gear
| from one company. That makes it even harder to persuade companies
| not to use huawei gear. It also makes it even harder for
| competitors, who now have dwindling sales, to keep up.
| kyrra wrote:
| The UK did a good job writing this up in a security report.
| It's not just a baseless attack, Huawei has poor software
| engineering practices.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Sure - but security isn't the major focus for many buyers. As
| long as it routes data from A to B and can keep the
| population connected, many governments and companies are
| happy to take the increased spy-risk in return for lower
| costs.
|
| Lets be honest, the future is end-2-end encryption and a dumb
| network, and then the security of the network becomes far
| less important.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Never overlook the ex NSA chief Hayden's timeless remark:
| "We kill people based on metadata".
|
| Owning or controlling these dumb pipes still means wielding
| _enormous_ amounts of power, political or military.
| kube-system wrote:
| There's not a network out there that won't work smoothly
| without support. Hardware breaks, software breaks,
| vulnerabilities are found. When sanctions ratchet up or
| bombs start falling, which support contract is still
| honored?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| As someone who's seen the code for Qualcomm's cellular modem
| (granted in 2009) and worked with their engineers, it would
| be impressive if it was tangible worse.
|
| I think we should be clear about the strategic threat of
| having a foreign company own telecommunication
| infrastructure, but that's technically true for US allies as
| well. The main distinction is that China is not an ally.
|
| Canada actually has rules about telecom companies needing to
| be owned by Canadians but I don't think that's served them
| all that well (& doesn't touch the question of who owns the
| infrastructure).
| girvo wrote:
| As someone who works with cell modems from basically all
| major and a couple minor manufacturers (mostly NB-IoT and
| 2G but not just) -- they're all bug ridden crap lol
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > Modern mobile networks work far better if you buy all the
| gear from one company
|
| The web is a lot easier to build for if you only support one
| browser! /s
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I don't understand the /s tag here. Both statements are
| categorically true; These facts just have consequences we
| don't like, and somehow must go out of our way to counteract
| if we care about our ideals.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, they aren't "categorically true". Anyone who has worked
| with big vendors know they manage to fuck up fully
| vertically integrated protocols.
|
| Vendors skipping standards and using proprietary stuff
| allows them to get way to sloppy and stuff has a habit of
| becoming unstable or hard to debug.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| My statement, at least, is categorically untrue. I had the
| displeasure of building for the web in the time before
| Firefox became mainstream. IE6 was essentially the only
| option. And it sucked! No competition meant bugs didn't get
| fixed. The web _was_ IE and Microsoft couldn 't give a
| flying fuck whether it followed the standard let alone
| behaved consistently even between page loads of the same
| site.
| COGlory wrote:
| >Modern mobile networks work far better if you buy all the gear
| from one company
|
| Do they really? How resilient/robust is such a network? What
| does "better" mean in this context?
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's akin to everyone in a company using outlook and an
| exchange server, vs everyone using a variety of mail clients
| and a mixture of server software.
|
| A bunch of features only work well if everyone uses outlook
| (integration with address books, calendars, free/busy info,
| auto video call invites, recalling messages). And you're
| gonna have far more headaches if you try to run a mis-mash of
| different servers and clients - although it is technically
| possible to get it all working.
| mbreese wrote:
| But that's the point of standardization. You are trying to
| ensure that the core functionality works for everyone
| regardless of who the vendor is. A mobile network much more
| akin to SMTP/IMAP than it is to intra office calendaring
| (but even then, CalDAV might have an opinion to offer).
|
| But this interoperability requires standards and vendors to
| adhere to those standards. But the only way you can get
| true interoperability is to test it, which is what this
| funding is about (IIUC).
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| No one cares; in the end no one is going to use it. It's just
| not worth the risk.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Huawei sells better and cheaper network hardware than anyone
| else.
|
| "Better" well put aside for the moment.
|
| Why do you think it's cheaper?
| tw04 wrote:
| >* Huawei sells better and cheaper network hardware than anyone
| else.
|
| If you spend a decade spending 10s of millions of dollars (or
| more) on R&D into cellular networks, and then I just take all
| of your findings and build a competing product, do you think I
| can sell my product for less money?
|
| If we assume all network gear is backdoored (it isn't but let's
| just assume it is because I know that will be the retort) would
| you rather the backdoor be controlled by a friendly, democratic
| nation, or an openly hostile, expansionist, quasi-
| communist/quasi-dicatorship?
|
| If you answer both of those questions truthfully, on what
| planet and by what logic would you suggest the world
| standardize on Huawei networking gear?
| lmz wrote:
| > If you spend a decade spending 10s of millions of dollars
| (or more) on R&D into cellular networks, and then I just take
| all of your findings and build a competing product, do you
| think I can sell my product for less money?
|
| This argument would be more convincing if the others had a
| competing product first, but it seems like they don't.
| p_l wrote:
| US vendors were happy playing margin games to satisfy stick
| markets and then Huawei dropped the bomb in form of end to
| end solution to update ones network.
|
| Turns out telcos did have appetite to upgrade in quite a
| lot of places..
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I'm blown away by the work done for Meta's Evenstar team. I loved
| the talk from XRComm at a OpenCompute Global Summit, in support
| of adding Evenstar to OCP. (The slides in particular show lots of
| figures-of-merit that evoked a strong response for me.)
| https://youtu.be/SXNH3ddpv1k
|
| The hardware looks absurdly economic & performant, crazy modular,
| and there's amazing changes happening on the software side too
| with much more being done closer to the edge in converged
| hardware.
|
| It's probably the highest tech (and extremely cost optimized)
| open source hardware design ever. It looks staggeringly far ahead
| of commercial offerings. If this doesn't jumpstart massive
| change, shame on the world. Modular designs for: power amplifier,
| power supply, digital control board, resonant cavity duplexer
| filter, signal processing firmwares, heatsink/case.
|
| Seeing this land at OCP seems hugely promising.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I watched about half of that video and it was too geared
| towards people who already have context. Could you distill it a
| bit? What's going on and why is it cool?
| mderazon wrote:
| https://engineering.fb.com/2023/06/29/connectivity/evenstar-.
| ..
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