Open RAN Policy Coalition Comments on 5G Challenge Notice of Inquiry

On February 10, the Open RAN Policy Coalition submitted a letter in response to the 5G Challenge Notice of Inquiry issued by the NTIA and DoD.

Coalition members are devoting significant resources to developing, standardizing, and validating open interfaces to allow secure and reliable interoperability across diverse market players, lower the barrier to entry for new innovators, and lower the cost of adoption by service providers.

We believe that in order to achieve the best outcomes, the 5G Challenge should target its scope to solicit solutions that foster open technologies, focusing on real-world applications that can be brought to bear now and will complement related ongoing federal efforts to spur 5G development and deployment.

We are pleased that our federal partners are also prioritizing this shared goal, and we look forward to working together on these issues in the months and years ahead. To that end, we offer the following three suggestions to most effectively scope the 5G Challenge in support of NTIA and DoD’s missions: 

  1. Clarify the Terms, Scope, and Goals of the Challenge to Support Open and Interoperable Interfaces;
  2. Target the Challenge to Focus on Areas of Impact by Prioritizing Real-World Applications Rather Than Basic Research and by Defining Evaluation Metrics; and
  3. Leverage the 5G Challenge to Augment DoD Testbeds and the NTIA Wireless Innovation Fund.

We describe these recommendations in greater detail in our letter, available for download here.