[otoburb]

>>It took commercial vendors nearly a decade to build 5G and the only reason they were so "fast" was because they had already experienced engineers on their payroll who understood the basics of 3G/4G.

100% agree. Also, many of the large domain players (Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE) actively participated in the 3GPP standards process to ensure they were kept abreast of what was being proposed. This is a pretty steep hill to climb for the US to build out a competitive domestic solution.

[rektide]

Sure seems like pursuing public source & public development might help generate some of that talent & know-how. If a nation has forgotten how to do something, or never knew in the first place (the Apollo Program), sometimes a climb is worthwhile, not only for where you get, but for what your nation learns & becomes along the way: greater. I'm in extreme favor of public-sourcing America into a nation with more more savvy & more skill at wireless connection. Get the ball rolling on getting better! Thankfully there seem like a lot of interested, civic minded folk out there, whose passion for radio-based connectivity & sharing that information is high.

Meanwhile our nation's cellular networks still run fantastically unsecure SS7, is my understanding.

Some kind of neat undertones of Secret History of Silicon Valley[1] here, except it's a different kind of protection, a different kind of guard for the world: not against military adversaries, but against our own inability to connect ourselves amid the software-run world.

[1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/