The U.S. military is behind commercial wireless carriers in the development of 5G technology, Mari Silbey, senior director of partnerships and outreach at smart solutions provider US Ignite, recently told National Defense magazine. The commercial wireless industry’s full attention to a single global standard has left little bandwidth for the type of custom equipment that the Defense Department (DoD) needs, according to Silbey.
Building off of existing consumer technology would help the military meet its specific needs and be a good strategy to keep costs down, according to Silbey. However, she warns that it would demand flexibility in the commercial technology, which is still lacking throughout that industry.
Another solution to the military’s dilemma is the use of open source technology, National Defense reports, which has been recognized by the DoD’s Future Generation Wireless Technology (FutureG) Office.
“We’re going to break open these traditional black box radio access networks and manipulate the components inside, but we’re going to need to be able to program and innovate on top of them,” Thomas Rondeau, principal director for the FutureG Office, said to National Defense.
Open radio access network (ORAN) technology, which splits the RAN network into a central unit, distributed unit and radio unit, is another possible solution, according to National Defense. ORAN would allow the military to knit together a diverse ecosystem of technology providers into specialized connectivity solutions, according to Silbey.
For the DoD, the future could be a combination of plug-and-play equipment and open interfaces for which software can be developed, she said. “At a very, very high level, if you think of it as some kind of orchestration system that then enables you to develop software functions that can plug into it, that is the holy grail of what the DoD would like to have, to be able to answer their specific communications needs that are not addressed by commercial technology.”
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
Reader Interactions