The debate around 5G — an embryonic technology that s seemingly poised to replace 4G and meet our ever greater "demands" for mobile data for streaming films, navigating self-driving cars, or getting rich on blockchain — is as much a war about patents as it is about business, security, and, well… thinking that everything that the Chinese do has just got to be bad.
China s a dictatorship, right? So, they re going to want to snoop and surveil, and probably snatch your first born, too.
"Democracies," on the other hand, like the USA, Germany and UK, are as pure as Columbian snow. …We ve never heard of the NSA or GCHQ, either.
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But the list of countries seeking to ban Huawei — a Chinese company — from future 5G networks is legion.
The USA tops that list, but the fact that an American firm called Qualcomm has its own star-spangled ambitions for 5G will have nothing to do with that.
Chinese company Huawei 5G exhibition stand in Beijing in 2018 (picture-alliance/dpa/S. Fan)
Chinese company Huawei is a leader in the 5G field, but it faces many challenges from countries threatening to ban its 5G technology
The Americans are followed by Australia, New Zealand, a currently no-so-great Britain, and Canada.
All five nations are part of the "Five Eyes" spy alliance, while others, further down the list of those either considering or threatening a Huawei ban, include countries like Denmark and Germany, who feature on an expanded lists of "Nine Eyes" and "Fourteen Eyes," respectively.
They ve all got it in for Huawei, and yet none of them can quite pull the trigger.
Huawei must be packing something special
The main players cited in 5G tend to be Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei.
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Each has their technological pros-and-cons — they are competitors, proposing alternative ideas, a bit like the VHS-Betamax wars in the 1970s and 80s, or DVDs vs. Blu-ray, or streaming vs 180-gram vinyl today.
As a result, 5G technology is all "still up in the air," as Muriel Médard, a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA, has described it.
And that may also explain why Huawei remains a contender, despite various concerns that it s just a front for the Chinese government and / or military.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel in front of a German flag in Slovakia, February 2019 (Getty Images/AFP/P. Simicek)
In February 2019, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Huawei would have to promise not to pass data to the Chinese state if it wanted to participate in Germany s 5G network
"Huawei has a good number of patents in 5G technology, patents that other companies don t have," says Torsten Gerpott, a professor in Technology and Operations Management at Duisburg University, Germany.
"I wouldn t necessarily say that Huawei has an advantage over other companies, but they are certainly the leading edge with Nokia and Ericsson," Gerpott says, "and as they re built into existing 4G networks, it will be hard, although not impossible, to substitute them technologically."
After some light prodding, Gerpott goes on to list a few of Huawei s other strengths.
He mentions CDMA technology, core network IP, and frequency-division multiplexing — all jargon to you and me, but vital for the next generation of mobile telecommunications.
A lot of this technology aims to maximize what can be done on a single network.
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Frequency-division multiplexing, for instance, is a method to split "bandwidth" — a cable, optical fiber, or air waves — so that different streams of data, whether that s phone calls, radio shows, or cash transactions, can flow without overlapping or interfering with each other.
Similarly, core network IP and CDMA technology are concerned with enabling various types of data to flow over a network, whether that s voice, data, video, games, GPS tracking, or navigation for cars.
In 5G s case, Huawei says this may be the data of up to a million people in a single square kilometer.
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Silence of the codes
How any of this will work depends largely on how a network is programmed and the efficiency of its code.
You know how some computers boot up quicker than others, some browsers search faster than others, and some webpages load like slugs. Well, that s all down to the efficiency of their code… like a well-oiled car, or a well-doped athlete.
And when it comes to 5G, there seems to be a battle between Huawei s "polar code" technology and Qualcomm s standard of "LDPC" (low-density parity check).
Gerpott s view is that the two are merely alternative approaches to the same sort of thing. And both are supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a group which is overseeing the standardization of 5G technologies. So they are equals in a sense.
Qualcomm 5G stand at a tech fair in Guangzhou, China, in 2017 (picture-alliance/dpa/L. Zhihao)
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Roughly speaking, polar code and LDPC are descendants of the "turbo code" which enabled 3G networks.
The new code, however, will have to facilitate data transfer speeds of up to 100 times faster than our current standard of 4G/LTE… And by the way, 4G is just 10 times faster than the previous generation, 3G.
But that doesn t really explain a lot to the average data abuser, the kind of person who makes a video call when they could just send a text.
So I contacted the so-called godfather of polar code, Dr. Erdal Arikan of Bilkent University in Turkey, to find out more.
DW: Why is Polar Code so significant in the 5G story, and how does it compare to Qualcomm s LDPG?
Arikan s response, while not swift, was succinct:
EA: I cannot comment on any of the questions you are asking simply because I do not have factual information regarding such issues. I hope you will understand.
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Alas, to be honest, I did not understand. So I sent this:
DW: I thank you for your kind response. Just to be clear, though, would you not be in a position to explain how Polar Code works, explain its defining features, even without reference to anything else or any other company?
EA: No, I do not wish to talk about my own work. You may ask Prof. Johannes Huber for an expert opinion.
