Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III: 5G Wireless Networks
Leverage the Defense Production Act Title III Office to Foster a 5G Wireless Ecosystem Enabled by Open RAN
The development and deployment of 5G wireless networks is essential to U.S. national defense, with a wide range of Department of Defense (DoD) applications for security, public safety, energy, and transportation. Despite these networks being critical to national defense, there are no large U.S. vendors in the marketplace, with only handful of European and Asian vendors able to provide at-scale deployment of 5G networks globally. This has left U.S. major carriers, and the Federal agencies they serve, reliant on just two vendors for equipment and professional services to deploy their 5G networks. As a result, this has led to widespread concerns over supply chain risk, with no easy solution of creating a new national vendor that can compete globally for 5G networks and beyond.
Despite these challenges, there are dozens of smaller, domestic vendors that are leveraging Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN) technologies to serve U.S. carriers. The Open RAN ecosystem is focused on creating virtualized networks that rely on commodity hardware and open software to ensure 5G networks are not dominated by the four largest vendors. However, these smaller companies need support for prototyping, scale-up, and hardening of Open RAN solutions to ensure products qualify as “carrier-grade”…
