China Will Likely Corner the 5G Market--and the US Has No Plan

[riversedge]

China Will Likely Corner the 5G Market—and the US Has No Plan

https://www.wired.com/story/china-will-likely-corner-5g-market-us-no-plan/



Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Images

You may have heard that China has cornered much of the world’s supply of strategic metals and minerals crucial for new technology, including lithium, rare earths, copper, and manganese used in everything from smartphones to electric cars. As of 2015, China was the leading global producer of 23 of the 41 elements the British Geological Society believes are needed to "maintain our economy and lifestyle" and had a lock on supplies of nine of the 10 elements judged to be at the highest risk of unavailability.

Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, and author of Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It.
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And so Huawei, and perhaps a couple of other Chinese companies, will control which data-rich services (think logistics, telemedicine, education, virtual reality, telepresence) are allowed to reach China's global market over 5G. This means China, through the actions of its 5G carriers, will be able to exclude US companies from that market. Yes, China already does this inside its borders; the Belt and Road Initiative will allow China to do this across huge territories that 65 percent of the global population calls home. China will have created, in effect, its own extraterritorial internet of high-capacity services, many of which we cannot now even imagine.

You may immediately think of the additional reach for Chinese surveillance; consider, in addition, the economic productivity and growth these high-capacity connections will make possible. The ability to be in the presence of a doctor or a teacher, to work effortlessly from any location without any perception of difference, to upload enormous files without interruption in a split-second—all of this will be made possible by China's fiber-plus-advanced-wireless internet.

The risk to the US of China's plans is obvious: American companies don't stand a chance in this context. China, not America, will be the place where new online services are born. Although the US came up with the idea of the internet, we don't have a sandbox to play in, a giant market in which to test new high-capacity services. That’s because we haven’t committed ourselves to keeping up with Asia and the Nordics by upgrading the ends of our networks, the "last-mile" network section that reaches homes and businesses, to fiber-optic cable.

Luckily, nearly 800 municipalities and cooperatives across the US are showing us the way. Sick of the expensive and second-rate connectivity they've been stuck with by federal policy failures, which have left most urban areas dominated by local cable monopolies charging whatever they want for whatever services they want to provide, and rural areas out in the cold almost entirely, they've taken matters into their own hands and called for the installation of fiber-optic cables. We need this policy issue to be on the radar screen at every level of government in America.

Here's what should happen: Publicly controlled fiber-optic cables should form a kind of wholesale street-grid, available for lease under nondiscriminatory terms to private operators who sell services. Government doesn't need to control connectivity; we are not China. Ideally, government should require frequent, open interconnection points for competing 5G operators to hang their gear on this street-grid made of glass, so that no one operator can pick which services succeed in a particular geographic area. Again, we shouldn't replicate the domineering ways of China's Huawei.

Above all, we need a plan. Right now we don't have one.................

[Wellstone ruled]

1. You snooze you loose.

[Progressive Law]

12. Except this time, it's they snooze, we lose.

[Wellstone ruled]

13. And we are loosing bigly.

We still have vast areas were Dial up is as good as it will ever be.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

14. but we have a "PLAN" after Teflon Don takes another Chinese bribe

[Wellstone ruled]

15. Let me guess,

Soup cans and store string.

[riversedge]

18. Sadly, so true

[marlakay]

2. We had the best internet

In the mountains in WA in small town that got fiber.

Now in larger town 85,000 we have slow cable internet as almost no other choice. I hate it. Once you have good internet its hard to go back.

[Achilleaze]

3. republicans have a plan for America: surrender

They have surrendered to russia for the love of money. No doubt if they can get their greedy little hands on some money from China they will continue to surrender the 5g realm.

It sucks having a five-time republican draft-dodging casino hustler and congenital liar running the super-duper shitshow that is Latter Day KGOP RepubliGreed, Inc.

[sarcasmo]

4. "We will have 6 G."

[MiniMe]

5. I've seen ads for 5G for AT&T I think, but it doesn't really exist yet here.

[Progressive Law]

11. ATT's "5G" is a fake 5G

[MiniMe]

16. That's what I thought

[underpants]

6. Such short sightedness. We could have multiplied our dominance with other than warfare

but the olds guards couldn't see the trees

[smirkymonkey]

7. Yeah, but I'll bet they haven't even started thinking about 6G!

Like our super genius president, who knows more about cellular mobile communications than anyone else in the WORLD!

[PubliusEnigma]

8. They are lapping us because they aren't dragging around a century of obsolete technology.

[IcyPeas]

9. well, maybe, but we have..... Coal.

[keithbvadu2]

10. Trump hilariously mocked after he writes technologically illiterate tweet

Trump hilariously mocked after he writes technologically illiterate tweet

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/trump-hilariously-mocked-writes-technologically-illiterate-tweet/

President Donald Trump started his day on Thursday with a bizarre tweet about the need for America to be the best at “6G” wireless networks, which don’t currently exist.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211850491

[moondust]

17. Maybe those communist 5-year plans

make some sense after all.

Five-year plans of China

(As opposed to surviving quarter-to-quarter in a decentralized, dog-eat-dog environment.)