Telecommunications (Security) Bill (First sitting)

Debate between David Johnston and Kevan Jones

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 14th January 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Jones]

Q In the near term, it is not going to replace the hardware that we need at the moment, which the two vendors are providing. Are you talking specifically about open RAN, or are you talking about diversification or any strategy to develop a UK hardware supplier?

Andrea Donà: There is an opportunity for British companies to play an active role in the open RAN ecosystem. As we open up the interfaces of the technology, it creates a golden opportunity for British companies, with British support and know-how, to come and contribute to the development of this new technology.

Patrick Binchy: My views are broadly aligned with the previous answers. The reality of the situation that we find ourselves in is that there are only two practical vendors for the next couple of years. As both my colleagues have said, beyond that there is opportunity for ORAN.

I am not sure if it came across in the previous answers, but I would stress strongly that the first thing we need is the R&D. We need to understand how we can move this technology forward. As Derek said, trials are primarily operating in rural capacity, but to be a true competitor to the incumbents we have to be able to use it in deep urban areas, under significant loads, which needs a lot of development.

The Government can support trials and help build the ecosystem around them, but the first thing that we need is to get the research and development that will feed the trials. In terms of the Government’s development of opportunities in ORAN, it is key that they look at working with international partners. This has to be scaleable; otherwise, it is never going to be commercially viable.  The UK market will not be big enough to drive that scale and commerciality.

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

Q It was widely reported that between 2009 and 2011, Vodafone found back-door vulnerabilities in equipment in Italy, and that you were assured by Huawei that they were being removed. You subsequently found that, in fact, they had not been removed. Do you have any concerns about back-door vulnerabilities in the equipment between now and 2027, and can you give us a sense of your management of that risk and what you do to try to make sure that there are not any?

Andrea Donà: Specifically on the incident you are referring to, which was in April 2019, it was a Telnet protocol, which is used by many vendors in the industry to perform diagnostic functions. It is important to note that it would have not been accessible from the internet. Detailed analysis showed that it was simply a failure to remove a function that is used, as I said, for performing diagnostics after it had been developed.

On the broader question of security and our concerns, we have always maintained the very highest level of security policies, security processes and security procurement mechanisms and frameworks. We use a layered approach to our security needs, whereby we secure by design. All our systems and process put in place guarantee the highest security standards, end to end. The UK networks and standards are the highest in the world. We constantly work hand in glove with the NCSC, and abide by all the latest NCSC guidance and policies to keep those minimum standards high every time. We have worked very closely with the NCSC to set up HCSEC, an ad hoc centre where any new Huawei equipment or software goes through rigorous checks, audits and assurances, in line and in close collaboration with NCSC.

Patrick Binchy: I do not have much to add to that. We are similarly aligned in terms of our processes, from procurement to deployment. We have security checks throughout, and separate functions to make sure that we are adhering to those. We work very closely with the NSCS and HCSEC in terms of the technologies that are in the network. Going forward, we will continue to do so. We will be reviewing the software and hardware versions that we have in place and ensuring that those are fully checked and validated. As I said earlier, we also have a full, independent view of the traffic traversing our network, so if something untoward were to start happening, we would immediately have a view of it, and would be able to shut it down independently.

Derek McManus: As I said earlier, we do not have sufficient numbers in the UK. We have fewer than 10 Huawei base stations, so although we perform all the necessary checks, we are not exposed on the scale of others in the market.

Telecommunications (Security) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between David Johnston and Kevan Jones

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 14th January 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Jones]

Q I do not disagree on that, but let us be honest. Telecommunications is a competitive market. If we want to move to open RAN or make real generational change, the Government will have to intervene quite heavily in the market to change minds. Operators will not do it unless they see a competitive advantage. That is possibly why we have had the situation with the hardware side of it, with China buying into the market by undercutting other people and providing state subsidies, for example. Without support for R&D and actual market intervention, that radical change will not happen quickly.

Matthew Evans: I think the £250 million is clearly initially focused on the R&D ecosystem. That is a big commercial barrier when you look at the testing environment and the time it often takes for operators, understandably, to feel confident in deploying equipment into their networks, because they are ultimately responsible for the integrity of them. If we can supercharge the testing environment in the UK, we should be able to shorten the time to market, but open RAN in particular is going to require a boost in funding to accelerate the maturity of that technology.

The other part of the diversification strategy is the scale vendors that may be operating in other parts of the world but are not present in the UK today. That is why it is also important to tackle some of the regulatory or commercial barriers that exist and prevent them from entering the market today.

Hamish MacLeod: I do not think I really have anything to add to what Matt just said.

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

Q I think we all support diversification in principle, but what does success look like for the two of you? How many companies would it be? We have only two vendors that we can choose from at the moment, so how many do you think is acceptable? Is there an analogous comparison for you, whether in tech or elsewhere, of the much broader choice that we should be aiming for, and how long do you think it will take to get there?

Hamish MacLeod: One of the things about open RAN and more open architecture generally is that you generate competition in the hardware and in the software—it is not one package—so I think it is realistic to expect more competition, particularly in the software side of things.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Johnston]

Q We asked the previous witnesses this question. When it comes to stringency on these issues, do any of you feel able to give us a sense of the international comparison between the regime that this Bill creates and regimes around the world?

John Baker: Perhaps I could take that one. This is falling in line with what is going on globally. We see initiatives coming from Spain, the EU and the US. The US is further ahead in terms of passing law on trusted suppliers, and it is now setting timelines and budgets for taking suppliers out of the network. That rip-and-replace programme is now under way. The money for that was approved in December, and operators are looking at open RAN as solutions for that. That is very similar to the activities that you are planning through this Bill in the UK.

Chris Jackson: What we have seen in Japan is strong support for this direction, but I think the UK Government have taken the lead in terms of putting forward an aggressive stance on this to ensure that the security of the country is protected. The UK is doing everything that we would expect it to, and we fully support that.

Stefano Cantarelli: Some of the things said about the diversification of the supply chain are particularly important in terms of the ability to create competition and, as such, innovation. The interoperability of interfaces is fundamental in order to boost data and to be able to create more competition. We strongly believe that competition is based in innovation, and innovation these days can create a very powerful cycle of technology. It is not like how it was in the old days when it took maybe a year, two years or three years to get things into deployment; today, in less than a year a trial can become a commercial deployment.

Pardeep Kohli: I agree with the other gentlemen. In a number of countries, operators have made the decision that, going forward, they will only buy open RAN-based solutions. Governments are supporting that in many parts of the world.

[Mr Jones]

Q This question is to whoever wants to pick it up. The debate in the UK on Huawei has been around hardware, and clearly open RAN is the future. Can you give an indication of two things? First, what are the timescales for its development and deployment? Secondly, because we have got operators currently taking out Huawei kit and putting in Ericsson or Nokia kit, how do you incentivise those companies to take the open RAN approach in terms of developing a market for that product? Where are we at internationally on open RAN compared with other countries?

Pardeep Kohli: Let me start. You are right that until now it was all about hardware, because people were building proprietary hardware to supply radio products. When you do hardware-based solutions, the scale matters, because you need logistics, manufacturing capability and factories, and obviously Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia had a strong base and the logistics set up.

When you do open RAN, it is more software leaning on general-purpose hardware. Companies like us do not need manufacturing plants any more because we are only providing software, and we have the advantage that our software can run on a private cloud that an operator can build on, for example, standard Dell servers—there are plenty of them, and people can build those—or we can run it on a public cloud on Amazon or Google. If you look at the scale that Google, Amazon and Azure have, Huawei is nowhere close to their scale. In that sense, the whole matter of Huawei’s scale does not matter at all the moment you move a hardware problem to a software problem.

The same thing happens with logistics and people. For us, hardware-based solutions need people to carry the hardware around, bolt it and everything. For software, with the click of a button you can distribute it to 2,000 sites; you do not need people and logistics to drive hardware around. This is how with what we are doing—for example, we are working with Dish to build a nationwide network, and we will have 50,000 sites deployed in less than two years—not that many people are required to do all this, because the problem has moved from hardware to software.

We would like the Government and other people to understand that there is no way any company can beat Huawei with the presence it has in China alone if they take on the problem as a hardware problem. It must be converted into a software problem—that is the only way it can be solved.

On your question about how we convince operators, it is always on the point about proof. We are a 20-year-old company working with operators all over the world. We handle 60% of the world’s operators’ messaging. If you look at SMS, for example, we carry that traffic for all the operators in the UK, and voice calling. We already do more critical services: radio is important, of course, because of the connectivity, but operators are relying on us for the day-to-day services. Now we are working with them to prove that our software is as good or better than what they can get on from the incumbents. Of course, we are expecting them to participate in the journey and work with us so that we can prove to them that we are good. We have done that in all other layers of the software, so we feel that if somebody engages with us, within six to nine months we will prove to them that we are good and it works.

That is working; in terms of the whole idea that the technology does not exist, we have crossed that hurdle. Now it is more about, “Okay, does it work for this use case or that use case?”, or, “In my network, I may have some proprietary stuff I have done with existing vendors, and I want you to do that as well.” So it may take six to nine months, or even 12 months, to get there, but I think we are beyond the point where we need to prove that it works. We know it works.