Biden Administration Considers ORAN Key to US Leadership on 5G
The Biden administration is fully behind the push to open radio access networks, which it considers critical to making networks more secure and maintaining U.S. leadership in 5G, said Amit Mital, special assistant to the president, during an Open RAN Policy Coalition webcast Wednesday. The move to ORAN is “inevitable,” he said: We've seen software-defined networking “already transforming the storage and networking industries, respectively. Open RAN is simply software-defined telecommunications.”
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“Despite being the country that invented most of the technology behind mobile telephony we no longer have a major telecom vendor” in the U.S., Mital said. “We don’t have leadership in one of the most important strategic technologies,” he said. ORAN means “most of the complex stuff moves from hardware into software,” he said. That means “much faster innovation and much lower price points,” he said: “Importantly, it plays to our strength as a country. We have the best software companies on the planet and our strength in software development” is “a national asset.” Most ORAN companies are U.S. based so far, he said.
One recurring question about open networks has been security , said Diane Rinaldo, executive director of the Open RAN coalition, who interviewed Mital. “Our coalition views this as an opportunity to discuss the security benefits of ORAN, such as greater visibility into threats, more flexibility to quickly address concerns,” she said.
ORAN security ties back to the security of the underlying platform itself, which is mostly based on cloud architecture, Mital said. Since most companies have moved their IT infrastructure to the same clouds, cloud security is already “well understood,” he said: “I’m not going to say it’s perfect, but it keeps improving and … it’s already pretty strong,” he said. The security of network components is also critical, he said. “We need to curate these components and to pick and choose ones that have been securely implemented and have the right security architecture in place,” he said. That’s “not unlike what we see happening with open-source software,” he said.
Mital also called for more work on the interfaces between components. “It’s clear that we need more complete specifications and also proof of implementation and documentation of best practices,” he said. Industry can help by “more aggressively” pushing on standards, he said.
ORAN will need deployment in developing countries to be successful, Mital said. “Scale matters,” he said: “Most of the untapped scale in mobility is in the developing world. That’s where there are literally billions of people and customers and the operators that serve them that haven’t yet committed to a specific technology approach.”
“We need zero-trust implementation all across the entire ecosystem … all the way through into the core,” said Jeff Edlund, Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief technology officer-Communications and Technology Group. “We don’t trust anything or anybody,” he said. ORAN means different vendors have to work together and all should understand the network, he said. It’s no longer “a black box,” he said: “When it’s open everyone can look at and observe what’s going on.” An open network may appear more risky, but “we’re opening up the solution to the light of day,” he said: “We have a much better opportunity to catch problems early. We have a much better opportunity to identify bad actors and get them out of the ecosystem.”
Security requirements need to “overlay” every part of an open network, said Douglas Gardner, Analog Devices chief technologist-CTO Office Security Center of Excellence. ORAN also means an “expanded threat surface,” he said. Since the components of a network are separated they all need to be secure, he said. Standard-setting organizations are critical “because we’re defining common interfaces, protocols, security requirements,” he said: “Without that you can’t have the vendor equipment interoperability that we’re saying needs to occur, the fair and open playing field.”