This archive report was first published on 17 December 2019.
On December 17, 2019, the world was on the cusp of a new industrial revolution, driven by the convergence of the physical and cyber worlds made possible by high-quality mobile internet broadband.
5G technology, the backbone of this revolution, was being touted as the next big thing, with speeds hitting over 100Mbps per mobile device and enabling new opportunities and business models.
Self-driving cars, flying taxis, intelligent factories, and smart cities were just a few of the seemingly futuristic activities that were already being experimented with and would soon become widely deployed.
As the world transitioned from the 3rd industrial revolution, powered by personal computers and the internet, to the 4th, driven by 5G technologies, China's Huawei was leading the charge.
With over 25,000 researchers, mostly PhD holders, working on improving and creating the next generation of mobile network technologies at its Shenzhen campus, Huawei was way ahead of the competition.
The US, however, was not about to give up without a fight. It claimed that Huawei's 5G communication equipment had deliberate security hooks that the Chinese government could use to spy on western governments.
But despite the US's efforts to raise security concerns and ask its allies in Europe to boycott Huawei equipment, many had not complied. After all, the equipment had been thoroughly checked and audited for security and safety concerns by US and European security consulting firms, with no major issues found.
As the 5G war raged on, it was clear that the US had lost its competitive edge, not just in 5G but also potentially in 6G and beyond. It was time for the US to reboot its systems and focus on getting back into the game, perhaps when the 7G technology was announced in another decade or so.
