Huawei and fellow China-based vendor ZTE were hot topics during a House Committee meeting this week focused on how the U.S. government should support open radio access network (RAN) technology development and deployment.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s “Strengthening American Communications Leadership with Open Radio Access Networks” meeting included testimony from a handful of open RAN industry supporters. This included representatives from Dish Network, Mavenir, the Open RAN Policy Commission and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).

Those representatives ostensibly provided an update on the progress of open RAN development and deployment as well as suggestions on what’s needed to further the development of the technology.

However, committee members from both sides of the aisle and those testifying made sure to also mention Huawei, ZTE and the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) as many times as possible.

“Countries like China have amassed a significant share of the global communications equipment industry and are leveraging this dominance to flood the market, including in the U.S., with cheaper, less secure alternatives. That includes equipment from companies like Huawei and ZTE, which are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said during her opening remarks. “Relying on this technology comes with significant risk. It could be used by the CCP to surveil Americans, steal people's personal information and even shut down entire networks. Homes, schools, hospitals, our finance system and the military are all in jeopardy as long as this equipment remains part of our communications infrastructure.”

“Many Americans would be surprised to know that only three companies dominate the 5G equipment market, one of them Huawei,” Representative Darren Soto (D-FL) added. “We literally have a policy of rip-and-replace to remove them from our network because of spying on us.”

Western governments have been looking at open RAN as a way to expand the availability of telecom network equipment from vendors outside of China.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last year noted the ability for open RAN technology to provide operators with greater access to more secure networking equipment.

“This effort is now underway, though completion by carriers depends, in part, on further funds from Congress for the reimbursement program — and that is key,” Rosenworcel said during a speech at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “When we set up this reimbursement program, we also made clear this was an opportunity for carriers to transition to open radio access network systems. In the long run, these systems can help diversify the technology in our networks and grow the market for more secure 5G equipment.”

Jeff Blum, EVP for external and government affairs at Dish Network, during this week’s session noted two ways open RAN can help counter security concerns from China-based vendors.

The first is the ability to use chipsets and silicon from a diverse vendor set, including from a number of U.S.-based suppliers like Nvidia, Broadcom and Intel. “Just take it out and put something new in,” Blum said of that flexibility. “That will allow the U.S. to compete with Chinese vendors because of open RAN.”

The second was in terms of using an open community to ensure security.

“You're always going to have intruders, … with open RAN the lights are on,” Blum said. “You're always going to have cockroaches, that’s a metaphor that we use. With open RAN you can see them and you can kill them. In a closed legacy system, you may not even know they're there.”

“I think Congress has really done an excellent job of giving us the tools to spur the ecosystem,” Blum added. “The Chinese vendors, they hate open RAN. Why? There’s competition, there’s transparency, there’s security, there's U.S.-centric leadership, there's U.S. software and no one does software better in the world than the United States. I think having the agencies, Congress and us as carriers and vendors go to the rest of the world, talk about our experience, our success, are the best ways to have an alternative to the Chinese vendors. We now for the first time have a real alternative.”

Paul Scanlan, CTO and president advisor for Huawei’s Carrier Business Group, during a press conference at last year’s MWC Barcelona event did not express “hate” toward open RAN, but he did claim unnecessary open RAN integration challenges that made it overly complicated for operators to deploy and manage.

“It’s complicated,” Scanlan said. “It’s not as easy as saying we’re going to decouple these things. The concepts are good. We tested Microsoft as an operating system many, many years ago on the base station just as we tested third-party chips to try and take that economy of scale from both of those. And it was a challenge. It’s a challenge.”

Suggestions this week also angled toward continued financial support for the rip-and-replace initiatives that are designed to help telecom operators remove legacy equipment from China-based vendors. Most of this equipment was installed a decade ago as part of 4G LTE deployments and before security agencies began questioning the potential security risk of equipment from vendors like Huawei and ZTE.

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report from 2022 estimated there were at least 24,000 pieces of Huawei or ZTE equipment spanning about 8,400 locations in U.S. telecommunication networks.

The U.S. government has been attempting to fund these efforts through its rip-and-replace program, which is officially known as the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program. That program emerged from the Secure Equipment Act of 2021, which has earmarked billions of dollars to help operators replace existing network infrastructure from China-based vendors.

However, funding for that initiative continues to lag.

“Rip-and-replace is only funded to 40% of the money,” John Baker, SVP of ecosystem business development at Mavenir, testified. “People like Mavenir that have participated in that … we're still outstanding in the completion of that activity to get the Chinese equipment out of our networks. There's still Chinese equipment in the networks waiting for this funding to take place.”

Diane Rinaldo, executive director of the Open RAN Policy Coalition, stated that the Chinese government continues to back vendors like Huawei and ZTE and is using government initiatives to deploy equipment into developing countries. That backing in some cases outweighs the potential benefits of open RAN.

“The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and their national champions are competing with the full financial backing of China in the strategic intent of vendor lock-in,” Rinaldo said. “Open RAN reduces costs of hardware and software and creates the possibility to break vendor lock-in. These heavy foreign investments tip the scales more than the cost savings that open RAN produces.”

The meeting agenda also touched on setting up a certification process that would provide standards to which open RAN components would need to comply.

“This would be a real opportunity for having a set of configurations that gets certified end-to-end and are made easy to deploy at a cost-effective way,” TIP Executive Director Kristian Toivo said during the proceedings.

The U.S. government has worked toward supporting open RAN testing initiatives.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently completed a 5G Challenge event that provided $7 million in “prize money” for vendors showing multi-vendor interoperability across open RAN components. That event was focused on interoperability across radio units (RUs) and combined central units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs).

Adam Koeppe, SVP of network planning at Verizon, in an interview with SDxCentral this week noted these events have been important toward the industry’s open RAN push.

“You're seeing a lot of activity with the U.S. government around creating test beds,” Koeppe said. “We're part of that process and we think it's actually very beneficial for development of open RAN at scale.”