Reply to post: Politics is never a good engineering solution

Vodafone names vendors tapped for Britain's first wide-scale OpenRAN build: NEC, Dell, and Samsung

martinusher Silver badge

Politics is never a good engineering solution

This initiative presupposes that Huawei is ignorant of OpenRAN, has no idea what it is, how its developed and deployed and how well it works in the field. This is expecting a bit much. Its likely that if Huawei could have provided solutions to customers based on open source code and generic computing units they would have, possibly replacing critical components with proprietary technology where there's a performance or cost advantage.

This suggests that the solution proposed by these companies is always likely to be second line, suitable for less dense service areas. It highlights the problem with politicians interfering with engineering decisions -- politicians in the UK just went in lockstep with what is now known to be a corrupt and incompetent administration who engaged in spurious bans and sanctions to gain political points rather than achieve any particular engineering goal (the primary goal of that administration was 'get power, keep power', nothing else).

I'm all for encouraging local expertise. As an engineer myself I've spend decades living with the dominance of financial people who have been reluctant to invest, greedy for immediate results and prone to sell out people and capabilities for a quick (and often just paper) profit. These decision makers belong in the same category as the company managers who (in the words of one ex-employee of a long defunct communications company) 'breathe engineers' -- they expect to hire when they can make money and fire when they can't. These day's there just isn't the people and what talent is available is spread through much wider (and potentially more lucrative) fields. So a quick headline grabbing initiative is unlikely to succeed -- you can't replace a systemic shortage of talent overnight.

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