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The US government makes a $42 million bet on open cell networks
Open RAN gets a boost to fight Huawei’s global cellular lead.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) grant would establish a Dallas O-RAN testing center to prove the standard’s viability as a way to head off Huawei’s steady cruise toward a global cellular network hardware monopoly. The company’s then CEO, Tareq Amin, told The Verge ’s Nilay Patel in 2022 that Open RAN would enable low-cost network build-outs using smaller equipment rather than massive towers — which has long been part of the promise of 5G. The 5G network was creaky and unreliable when former Verge staffer Mitchell Clarke tried it out in Las Vegas in 2022, but the company said in June last year that it had made its goal of covering 70 percent of the US population.
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