USG Embraces Open Source 5G

While the world was on edge back in January, watching to see if the United States will have a peaceful transition of power or fall into chaos, an important announcement from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) was released but swept under the “attention rug” -- 5G Challenge Notice of Inquiry.

This is the first example I’ve seen where the US government is explicitly engaging with the open source technology community on something as strategically important as 5G.

5G doesn’t just have a geopolitical problem. It has a “black box” problem and an antitrust problem. It is currently dominated by three major telecom equipment vendors -- Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia. Even though Huawei has been effectively pushed out of any market that’s concerned with China’s influence, having only two options left to choose from is not a good situation.

A few weeks ago, the four largest European telcos -- Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, and Orange -- signed a Memorandum of Understanding supporting OpenRAN, an open source 5G network project. Looks like USG is taking its own steps to figure out how to support an “open” 5G stack.

Let’s dig into the details, possible players, and future implications.

NTIA’s Request

First, a quick tutorial of what NTIA is.

It is a bureau within the Department of Commerce (think of it as a division inside a big corporation), whose policy portfolio includes all things related to telecom and Internet access, which is how we all access information these days, thus the “I” in NTIA. When I was a staffer at Commerce 10 years ago, I interacted quite a bit with folks from NTIA. We were working on expanding broadband Internet access in rural regions of America. (Netflix’s streaming quality on a farm in the Midwest back then was not great). NTIA’s policymaking purview has an obvious impact on the tech sector, thus it’s one of the more “tech literate” government agencies, but it has a low public profile.

Just like any large bureaucracy, there’s a lot of overlapping jurisdictions within the USG. This particular 5G Challenge Notice of Inquiry issued by NTIA is actually “under sponsorship of and in collaboration with the Department of Defense 5G Initiative”, in order to “accelerate the development of the open 5G stack ecosystem in support of Department of Defense missions.” The DoD is the agency driving the broader effort, and NTIA is tasked with implementing a part of it.

A “Notice of Inquiry” is a common vehicle for the government to solicit suggestions from the public when it wants to do something, but doesn’t really know how. The “something” appears to be a competition of sorts among players in the private sector and academia to develop an open source 5G stack faster, by providing the backing and endorsement of the USG. The technical motivation behind this Notice is worth block-quoting:

“Many innovations are being explored in the greater 5G economy. One movement that appears to be gaining traction across the ecosystem is the use of open-source implementations for various components of a 5G system. Among those components is the 5G protocol stack.”

The three questions that the NTIA sought input for are also worth noting:

“(1) Challenge structure and goals; (2) incentives and scope; and (3) timeframe and infrastructure support.”

In a nutshell: we (the government) don’t really know how to do this, but we really need to do this quickly, so tell us what you (the industry) need to make this happen!

Among the organizations that responded to this Notice, one caught my attention -- GitHub. Here’s the full-text of GitHub’s submission. Let’s break it down.

GitHub’s Submission

Most of GitHub’s official response reads like an “open source 101” tutorial for DC policymakers. That’s well warranted. Most policymakers don’t understand what open source development entails -- best practices, level of transparency, and expectations. To NTIA’s credit, it didn’t pretend to know what open source was either in the Notice and just used the word “open” for most of it.

GitHub’s response explained some important, fundamental concepts of open source:

• Build in public in a public repository
• Adopt modern software development practices, like continuous integration (CI) and ongoing security scanning
• Contribute “upstream” to benefit the whole ecosystem and avoid breaking dependencies
• Implement an open governance structure with multiple stakeholders

As GitHub’s accompanying blog post regarding its submission noted: “policymakers have sometimes misdefined or confused the term open source with other uses of ‘open’ meaning simply interoperable or available to all.” Given my own interaction with policymakers when discussing open source, this assessment sounds about right. Even companies who came from the “proprietary” way of building software still don’t have a firm understanding of what “open source” really means.

This submission isn’t all educational and altruistic; there’s a self-interested element to it too! GitHub wants to be considered as the platform to host this 5G Challenge. It already hosts the repos of two 5G related projects: the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP, part of the Linux Foundation, with DARPA participation) and the OpenAirInterface (with NSF participation). GitHub also touted its in-house tools, like DependaBot and various security vulnerabilities tracking, to further support its case as the right place to host this 5G Challenge.

Of course, having Microsoft as its parent doesn’t hurt either. As I wrote last year when discussing the DoD’s massive cloud contract, JEDI, Microsoft has made deep inroads within the USG to sell its Azure cloud offering to support the military. Having GitHub, where most developers already “live”, as the home of this 5G Challenge seems like the obvious choice.

America’s Confidence

I personally don’t have a stake in whether GitHub (or GitLab or any other collaboration platform) gets chosen. However, I am emotionally invested in advocating for the USG to better recognize the advantages of the open source development model -- speed, robustness, security, and (most importantly) trustworthiness -- as it attempts to re-energize technical innovation in the country. Open source best practices play to America’s own strengths as an open, inclusive society. (See my past writings on this topic here and here.)

Embracing, convening, and supporting open source is the right way to lead, not picking “national champions”, which is what China does. This NTIA Notice of Inquiry is a critical step in the right direction. Given that the DoD is already a big customer of open source software (every F-16 fighter jet runs three Kuberentes clusters), incorporating open source to develop 5G should not be a hard sell.

However, the NTIA is still a low-profile bureau inside the typically low-profile Department of Commerce. Given how strategically important 5G is, as this Challenge takes shape, I hope some capital from the White House (perhaps an East Room event?) would be spent on highlighting it.

One tricky, lingering question remains: how inclusive will this USG-led effort be given the current geopolitical climate?

GitHub’s blog post contains a poignant sentence: “With open source, collaboration can provide solutions based on the merits of commits, not politics or proprietary interests.” Indeed, both ONAP and OpenAirInterface have members from around the world, including Chinese organizations. ONAP’s Technical Steering Committee has research engineers from China Mobile, China Telecom, and Huawei (as well as technologists from large American, European, Canadian, and Indian telcos). OpenAirInterface’s membership roster includes the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, as well as academic organizations from around the world.

For these industry and academia-driven organizations, including Chinese telcos and universities makes sense from a pure technology development perspective. For the last few years, China is the only country investing at scale to build 5G infrastructure, so its hands-on experiences and know-hows are all worth referencing. The DoD’s early experimentation with 5G wasn’t announced until last October. On the public adoption side, Verizon just received its first shipment of 5G base stations (made in America, but made by Ericsson) last July -- even made a warm and patriotic video for it:

I highly doubt any Chinese organization will be allowed to participate in a future open 5G Challenge; that’ll be a PR nightmare, even though every line of code, every contribution will be committed and checked transparently in the open anyway.

The question that hits closer to home is: will American technologists of Chinese descent be allowed to contribute their expertise, without extra scrutiny and skepticism?

This question used to be unthinkable, when America was stronger, more self-assured, and more confident. A lot of that has been put to doubt, from within and without. America’s confidence has been shaken by China’s rise and its poor handling of COVID-19, race relations, and many other social issues beyond the realm of tech.

Embracing open source and implementing true inclusiveness, especially for a big ticket item like 5G, would no doubt help America regain some of that confidence and soft power. But the dynamic is a Catch-22: to be inclusive, you need to be self-assured and confident enough to begin with (that’s partly why China, for all its advancement and wealth, is not that inclusive).

How this 5G Challenge unfolds will show whether America is really on the path to regaining its confidence and strength.

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