If China Dominates 5G, It Will Control the Future

The US needs a positive alternative to the Chinese 5G model, and it needs to put it forward right now, before or during Barcelona. If we don’t, this year’s Mobile World Congress risks turning into a victory lap for Huawei and Beijing. The solution is not, as some have put it, to “become like China to beat China.” China is playing to its own strengths—state-directed investment and financing, lack of checks and balances internally, and a unified decision-making structure—to support its goal of wireless domination.

To counter this, we should play to our own strengths in turn: A culture of innovation, the power of price discovery, and deep and liquid financial markets. Our incumbent carriers are moving too slowly on 5G, content to deceptively rebrand their existing 4G networks as suddenly “5G” rather than deploy the networks of the future. Decisive action building a public-private partnership in the near term demands that we make shared spectrum available for a carrier-neutral, wholesale-only, nationwide 5G network to be built in the next two to three years across the entire country. This could be a kind of wireless moonshot (but with private capital) that will spur microelectronics manufacturing here at home, accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks, and show the world that Chinese wireless dominance is not inevitable.

By making the network wholesale and adhering to a principle of open access (rather than limited access for some companies) both existing industry players and new, entrepreneurial startups could get in the game. This would ensure the new spectrum would not become the plaything of one industry giant to the detriment of all others. Open access should also mean that available network capacity cannot be hoarded. This will increase utilization, expand the economically viable edge of the network, and allow price competition rather than oligopoly economics to set the cost of network access. This will increase return on new investment and accelerate investment in American 5G. The project should be nationwide, with broad geographic coverage—in contrast to current operators’ plans for targeted, urban-specific 5G rollouts, which leave rural America in a 3G or 4G world.

[Newt  Gingrich  was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999]