Reaching consensus on the parts of a mobile platform is complicated. Decisions have to be made about dozens of specifications for transmission speeds, radio frequencies, security architecture, and the like.
To make that happen, engineers gather in a series of meetings every year to choose which new technologies will be deemed #standard in the next generation.
The stakes are high: The companies that provide the fundamental technology for 5G will be embedded in a global communications system for years to come.
So in the background are financial, nationalistic, and even geopolitical considerations.
“From the year 2001 to the present—three administrations—not enough attention has been paid to this,” says #Reed#Hundt, a former Federal Communications Commission chair during the Clinton administration.
Hundt is one of a number of current and former officials alarmed that the United States has no equivalent to Huawei
—that is, a major telecommunications company that both develops next-generation technology and builds it into equipment.
“In Europe, they have an Ericsson.
In Japan, they have companies.
And in China, they have not just Huawei but also ZTE.
But Huawei is the one that covers the whole range of products.”
All of this made Huawei's 5G standards bid an alarming prospect.
“Huawei's IP and standards are the wedge they intend to use to pry open the Western computing world,” Hundt says.
The body that develops 5G standards, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project ( #3GPP ), is an international umbrella organization of various telecommunications groups.
In 2016, it made a key decision on what was called #5G#New#Radio#standards
—the part that helped determine how data would be sent over 5G and how it would be checked for accuracy.
After spending millions, undergoing years of testing, and filing for multiple patents, Huawei was not going to pull punches at the critical juncture. It needed the certification of an official standard to cement its claim.
The problem was that reasonable people argued that other techniques would work just as well as polar codes to achieve error correction in the new framework.
Some suggested that a revamp of the current 4G protocol, turbo codes, would be sufficient.
Others, notably San Diego-based #Qualcomm, which makes chipsets for mobile technology, liked a third option:
Robert Gallager's old #LDPC idea, the one that had nearly reached the Shannon limit and had inspired Arıkan on his own intellectual journey.
Since the early 1960s, when Gallager proposed LDPC, technology had improved and the cost of commercial production was no longer prohibitive.
Qualcomm's R&D team developed it for 5G.
Though Erdal Arıkan did not know it at the time, his work would be squared off against that of his mentor in a competition that involved billions of dollars and an international clash of reputations.
thepoliticalcat