We are behind in the game and we don't have anyone capable in this sphere. Nokia, Erikson, Huawey, and Samsung have all the market now and we need american presence there. We can't create a state company, so we will try to break the leaders either by sanctions or by diminishing the value of their IP through open standards until the moment when the standards are open enough to favorite our proprietary IP using them.
While the 3GPP Profile and Spec aren't exactly "Open" by Open Source and HN's Standard, It is definitely not closed or proprietary. You can implement a working 3G / 4G / 5G system. It just wouldn't be competitive with commercial offering.
And US actually has plenty of IP via Qualcomm in Core Standards. Ignoring IoT and AV ( Autonomous Vehicle ). Also partly via Nokia when acquired Alcatel-Lucent, where Lucent is from AT&T Bell Labs.
So No, US aren't out of the 5G circle. They just dont have any companies making specific part of the 5G infrastructure.
Be serious, being in the periphery means that Trump was proposing buying share in Nokia and not investing in Cisco.
We fell down on basic R&D: most of the labs got wiped out by "cost accounting" and short term profit seeking.
We fell down on basic infrastructure: much of the country isn't gigabit, let alone DSL.
We fell down on basic STEM education. Other countries pay for everyone's education as an investment in the future.
We fell down retaining existing leadership areas, offshoring them for short term profit. Now we can't make some of these things and need to buy them back with import tariffs.
Who could have forseen this coming?
It's good, because it means we are generally focused on more profitable endeavors. It's bad because it means most of what we 'need', since commodities are the basis of our lives, get produced elsewere. This was fine when we had the wool of globalism pulled over our eyes, but COVID and the rise of China have shown us it was a pipe dream the whole time.
TBH, I'm okay with open 5G and even more, I'm just pointing that the sudden desire of the US government to create it is not from the purity of their hearts. The bad thing will be if they try to shape the openness in such a way that it will favoritize the US companies and hinder anyone else.
It's hard to compete with free, but that doesn't mean the world should be stuck paying rents to proprietary vendors from now to the end of time. Sometimes your business model gets disrupted by a VC dumping a billion dollars into a money-losing startup. Sometimes it gets disrupted by a nation state dumping a billion dollars into money-losing R&D, that they then gift to their domestic firms. It's fine when Europe does it, it's fine when China does it, it's fine when the US does it.
The reason it's fine is because there's nothing about capitalism or markets that require your competitors to be profitable... Just like there's nothing about capitalism or markets which forbids arbitrary, regional advantages, be they related to your geography, your access to human capital, a unique regulatory environment, or your access to a friendly government that will subsidize your business (With grants, or R&D credits, or tech transfers, or just by buying a lot of stuff from you.)
To put another way - if some other government funded the development of a drug that cured cancer for $2/dose, I wouldn't shed any tears for the trillions of dollars of wasted R&D, and lost profits for existing vendors of cancer medication. I'd still feel that way, even if they went ahead and gifted the IP to a domestic vendor, that sold it at a hefty markup.
Sorry, but I just had to. This is likely the exact scenario. Well put.
Infantilizing is what 'Frondo refers to, "ninja rock stars" job descriptions. What they have in common with business jargon is using a lot of words to communicate near-zero actual content. They use language to press emotional buttons in the audience to create a desired atmosphere (importance and fun, respectively).
I think GP did a really good job, and I prefer their take.
"...The 5G Challenge would leverage the innovative capabilities of the software development and telecommunications technology communities to enable more open implementations of 5G systems, including end-user equipment, the radio access network, and the core network, with a focus on the 5G protocol stack software. "
How about:
"We want to run a game with a big reward. A game that gets people to come up with the most innovative, clever, secure, resilient ways to use 5G for our military that we haven't seen before.
Do you have ideas for how 5G can be implemented in open hardware or software? Do you have ideas for how we can structure a game and its reward to achieve something like that?
Let us know if you have ideas, and you may be able to be a part of something big."