After banding together to boot Chinese telecoms out of critical networks, the United States and Europe are struggling to agree on what 5G should look like without China’s input.
American concerns about China’s telecoms equipment have shifted to worries that the industry is overly reliant on Huawei’s two main competitors, Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia, and that the U.S. itself lacks homegrown vendors to pick from.
Meanwhile, in Europe, attempts by the telecoms industry to design a new, “open” 5G architecture known as Open RAN have raised fresh security concerns.
Government officials across the Atlantic in the past two years rallied around a policy to limit the role of Chinese 5G equipment-makers Huawei and ZTE. The U.S., Europe and like-minded partners now widely share the view that Chinese providers should be blocked from building critical networks that’ll power everything from connected cars to factories and communications networks.
A harder question to answer is: How to replace Huawei?
Clashing visions on what 5G should look like without Chinese kit are coming to a head at a conference of security officials in Prague on Tuesday and Wednesday which will be attended by high-level officials from a wide group of countries including the U.S., U.K., Japan, Australia, India, Israel and EU members.
“A successful transition to 5G and beyond requires a diverse and competitive marketplace which prevents dependence on a small number of suppliers, particularly those considered to be high risk, or a single country,” according to draft conclusions seen by POLITICO.
Czech officials organizing the gathering are looking to get buy-in from attending governments to support their “Prague Proposals,” which stress ways to “help realize the potential of open and interoperable networks” and promote “open, global, industry-led … development of technical standards” like Open RAN.