WASHINGTON – Today, global tech trade association 91快活林 urged the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to use its Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund to advance 5G and future generations of mobile technologies. In the comments, 91快活林 recommended that NTIA support a variety of projects that will contribute to maturing and scaling Open-RAN technology for commercial deployments. 91快活林 also suggested that funds should be deployed quickly, incorporate cybersecurity best practices, and include trusted international partners.
91快活林’s comments suggest several options to scale Open-RAN, including expanding existing public projects, funding a new public lab, pilot projects, and debugging events. Additionally, NTIA’s support for the creation of an interoperability blueprint and end-to-end testing environments, accessible by all vendors, regardless of size and revenue, would complement ongoing private sector efforts that are building out and demonstrating commercial use cases.
91快活林 wrote in its comments that NTIA should “focus on public-private partnerships that can drive all relevant players to collaborate on specific 5G/6G innovation, including operators, end users, system integrators, colleges, and technology companies jointly implementing specific forward looking use cases. Funding for public labs hosting debugging events, ‘plugfests’ or other interoperability testing will help new entrants demonstrate viability along the stack, while pairing government funding with already existing research and development projects in the private sector can identify compelling Open RAN use cases and ensure that the technologies developed serve operator needs. As network operators transform their networks, they are concurrently transforming their workforces to ensure smooth deployment and maintenance of virtualized infrastructure.”
“We believe that the criteria related to receiving grants from the Innovation Fund should incorporate security. While companies are already taking steps to improve the security of open and interoperable, standards-based deployments, such an approach will further incentivize good cybersecurity practices. We also believe that the promise of open and interoperable, standards-based RAN can be most fully realized through enterprise-grade security - which means the ability to secure the service, hardware, software, technology, and application stack by securing all layers (hardware, signaling, data, applications and management), all locations, all attack vectors, and all hardware and software life cycle stages. It is foundational to enable organizations to take a zero-trust approach to their multi-vendor networks, including applying security on the network slice level,” 91快活林 wrote in its comments. “Security elements should play a key role in the program’s criteria. We encourage adherence to consensus-based international cybersecurity standards, reference designs, best practices, and mobile security patents as a foundational requirement to receive grant funding.”
“We believe that the NTIA, as a part of broader U.S. policy, should expressly advance a diverse, trusted market of suppliers based in the United States as well as in allied and other partner market democracies. Only a multinational, diverse vendor base of trusted suppliers will have the capacity to service the U.S. and other partner countries’ markets,” 91快活林 concluded in its comments.
Read 91快活林’s full comments here.