Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
ERDAL ARIKAN WAS born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.
He loved science.
When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.
This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes.
“I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university.
Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to #CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California.
He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist #Richard#Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
The field was still young, launched in 1948 by #Claude#Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs;
he would later become a revered MIT professor.
Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage.
By publishing a general mathematical theory of information
—almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop
—Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age.
The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose #MIT for graduate studies.
There was one reason: “#Bob#Gallager was there,” he says.
Robert Gallager had written the textbook on information theory. He had also been mentored by Shannon's successor.
In the metrics of the field, that put him two steps from God.
“So I said, if I am going to do information theory,” Arıkan says, “MIT is the place to go.”
By the time Arıkan arrived at MIT, in 1981, Gallager had shifted his focus and was concentrating on how data networks operated.
Arıkan was trembling when he went to Gallager's office for the first time. The professor gave him a paper about packet radio networks.
“I was pushing him to move from strict information theory to looking at network problems,” Gallager says.
“It was becoming very obvious to everyone that sending data from one place to another was not the whole story
—you really had to have a system.”
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.