The Tortoise-and-Hare Race for 5G Dominance

So many of us these days are tied to our wireless devices nearly every waking hour. Our cellphones are practically another appendage. Our professional lives—and all too often our personal lives—revolve around our ability to connect anytime and anywhere to the reams of information and data we require in an increasingly digital age.

Beyond our personal usage, however, wireless technology is rapidly becoming ever more essential to our critical infrastructure, military operations, and national security and homeland defense. And our national security and cybersecurity concerns are intertwined with America’s economic interests and with concerns for individual freedoms around the world. When China’s high-tech companies benefit, it is too often to the detriment of industry in America and other democratic nations.  

Among other benefits, 5G offers dramatic increases in bandwidth, which allows significantly more information to flow. It enables millimeter wave radio, multiple-input and multiple-output capabilities and beamforming, which increases bandwidth and capacity for radio links. For the military, those wireless networks will support everything from tactical, on-the-move communications to command and control of swarms of drones and hypersonic missiles. Commanders and warfighters of all ranks will need to make decisions in milliseconds. Our reliance—as individuals and as a nation—will only grow as technology moves beyond 5G into 6G, 7G, Next G, or whatever terms we choose to apply.

According to one expert who recently spoke to our Cyber Committee, current 5G capabilities go a long way toward securing data left unsecured by its predecessor capabilities. It addresses many security concerns that have emerged in recent years, in large part by fundamentally transforming the mobile networking architecture. With 5G, developers proved they have learned an important lesson: bake in security from the beginning. That is a lesson learned the hard way.

The security of 5G and its offspring will grow stronger with the implementation of zero trust, the quantum-resistant algorithm standards being developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other initiatives already underway.

But what has emerged is an international strategic competition in the wireless telecommunications arena. The United States, China, Russia and others are racing to integrate 5G and beyond-5G technologies into government and military networks and critical infrastructure. Just as vital, however, is the need to influence the technology standards that will determine the future of next-gen telecommunications.

The central issue is that our competitors on the global stage bake into their components and systems the tools for furthering autocracy, violating personal privacy, trouncing on human rights and stifling democracy. When China exports its 5G components, it essentially exports authoritarianism. So, what we’re seeing is a struggle to influence the international standards associated with those technologies.

This is a struggle fought in the international standards bodies, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project and the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector.

China put the world on notice when the Standards Administration of China created the China Standards 2035, a global strategy to push its own standards as worldwide standards. China added to that with the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global investment plan aimed at making China’s authoritarian regime the dominant influence across the world.

The 2022 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community indicates that China will continue to push BRI to expand the country’s economic, political and military presence abroad and will attempt to improve the BRI brand and minimize international criticism. “China also will promote new international norms for technology and human rights, emphasizing state sovereignty and political stability over individual rights,” the report warns.

It wasn’t long ago that experts described the United States as being far behind China in this race for technological influence. And it is true that democracies by design work inherently more slowly than autocracies. But the race for next-gen dominance is a marathon, not a sprint. And it may very well turn out to be a tortoise-and-hare competition, with the United States being the slower starter.

But we all know how that fable turns out.

Never underestimate the tortoise.