The Defense Department has a new plan to deploy its own 5G wireless systems on military bases and other operating locations around the world, hoping to fill in the gaps not served by commercial telecom companies in, for example, remote and austere locations.
The new private 5G deployment strategy — signed by acting DoD CIO Leslie Beavers on Oct. 16 and made public this month — calls for “accelerated” deployments of DoD-only 5G networks, but with a tailored approach that takes each location’s needs into consideration.
Notably, the strategy makes clear that the department’s preferred choice, in most cases, is to make use of the trillions of dollars in 5G infrastructure that commercial firms have already deployed around the world, but that the military services will also need options to create their own networks where there simply are no commercial towers.
“A key aspect to DoD’s IT modernization effort is to leverage 5G networks, both commercial and private, to deliver ubiquitous high-speed connectivity for mobile capabilities,” Beavers wrote in a letter accompanying the strategy. “Commercial networks offer core 5G services to a broad range of users across densely populated portions of military installations … however, DoD acknowledges that under certain circumstances, commercial networks may not fulfill an installation’s requirements. Private networks can augment or supplement commercial services, as they are tailored to the specific installation’s mission needs, security and military-unique capabilities.”
Private 5G needs already apparent in INDOPACOM
And since the release of DoD’s broader 5G strategy in 2020, the military services’ experimentation with the latest generation of wireless technology has borne out the need for private 5G, in, for example, further-flung areas of the department’s Indo-Pacific Command.
Kurt Andrews, the principal investigator for 5G efforts at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, said the commercial networks DoD has been using in early efforts offer 99.999% uptime. Technologists have successfully used those wireless links to, for example, connect quadcopters that help technicians with on-base aircraft maintenance.
“But there’s obviously going to be places as we look West — islands that we call them places, not bases — where maybe there won’t be networks,” he told a Honolulu conference organized by AFCEA late last month. “We all want to be prepared for that, and we’re looking at the ability to project forward, to bring 5G into that world. What would be great is if those networks that we project forward also work with the technology we use on the public networks so that it’s very seamless to the user. We could deploy warfighters, give them SIM cards, give them phones, no matter where they’re operating. That, I think, is our vision.“
More guidance, possible “core” network coming
Defense officials said more detailed guidance on exactly how the military services should implement private 5G would be coming in the next several months.
But the strategy also hints that DoD may be leaning toward an enterprise approach to private 5G services. Exactly what that might look like is still unclear: According to the document, the department is still conducting an analysis of alternatives to decide whether DoD should develop its own “core” worldwide 5G network, or whether the military departments should buy their private implementation “as a service” from commercial providers.
The strategy’s release comes roughly one year after Congress made its own push to get the military to adopt private 5G. As part of the 2024 Defense authorization bill, lawmakers ordered the department to draw up a strategy that, among other things, streamlines the process for commercial wireless companies to build wireless infrastructure on bases and implements a modular approach that lets new technology be inserted and upgraded over time.
Open 5G standards
To answer the “modular” part of the equation, the final strategy leans on the existing Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) concept, which emphasizes interoperable radio standards, hardware-agnostic networks and the incorporation of cloud technologies. Officials said they would encourage the development of an O-RAN “ecosystem” by prioritizing those approaches in the department’s acquisition decisions, and by conducting more prototype work on how to adopt open source O-RAN specifications like the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC).
And Defense officials have significant reasons to want communications networks that operate with secure, well-understood interfaces — whether commercial or private — particularly in areas such as logistics, and for increasingly advanced systems that rely on AI algorithms that require frequent software updates.
“In sustainment realm, you could imagine hundreds or thousands of unmanned systems which need to be ready to be deployed within a fairly constrained timeline — but that deployment may be one year out or three years out, we don’t know,” said Chris Murphy, a science and technology advisor to the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. “If I’ve got them stacked in a warehouse, how do I support over-the-air updates to ensure that the continually-developed software stacks are routinely deployed to these systems? It gets to the ability to leverage in-place infrastructure without having to deploy wired or more bespoke systems. That also gives you a lot of flexibility to move where these things are stored, from maybe a desert to a coastal city — you can take advantage of a lot of the local infrastructure to support that sustainment … 5G, and specifically leveraging commercial and public infrastructure to support that, is huge.”
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