Huawei Scare Impact Carriers to Tackle Control of 5G Suppliers

The last year Huawei ban has shocked the telecom sectors, not such a lot for the forced absence of GApps on the Chinese manufacturer’s smartphones and tablets, except for the difficulties that operators and stakeholders face regarding the spread of the latest generation networks.

This is a huge impact because blocking or banning one among the three main players within the field of 5G infrastructures means for telephone companies to possess to review their strategies, taking into consideration a possible delay in entering the market compared to the competition.

It was after the choice by the UK to severely limit Huawei’s presence on the national network that there was an acceleration within the talks between the varied operators, willing to collaborate to develop a standard technology that creates them independent of individual suppliers of infrastructure.  And, here, the regard to Huawei is clearly not accidental.

Right now, the three major players within the sector – Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson – have developed solutions that can’t be integrated with infrastructures, switches, and antennas made by other manufacturers. In other words, so far the Huawei network only works with Huawei systems and infrastructures, also as Nokia with Nokia and Ericsson with Ericsson. So how can we be less hooked into this obligation?

Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone are carrying out some projects for the development of more flexible network architecture, capable of working with products and infrastructures made by multiple manufacturers. Deutsche Telekom is then part of O-RAN’s AT&T, an alliance that should have launched a new initiative with TIP (another network project involving hundreds of companies) at MWC 2020 (canceled due to the coronavirus epidemic ).

The alliance is described by Alex Jinsung Choi of Deutsche Telekom:

O-RAN Alliance was created to accelerate the offer of products that support an open and common architecture, as well as standardized interfaces that we, as operators, consider to be the basis of our next-generation wireless infrastructure, while guaranteeing a large community of suppliers driven by innovation and competition in a free market.

The most feasible way for O-RAN and TIP together (but also for Telecom Infra) is to create a virtual wireless network based on standardized open-source software that works on hardware supplied by different companies (and therefore not by one alone).

Ericsson and Nokia could not ignore these changes, and they joined TIP and O-RAN respectively. ” Better get involved, ” Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri sincerely admitted.

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