Everything You Need to Know About 5G and What it Means for National Security

Declan Ganley is the Chairman and CEO of Rivada Networks. You can listen to the interview here.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. There is an enormously important battle space opening up in that war for the free world and most of us have never heard of it let alone understand its possible implications for everything from our personal and individual lives to the security of our country. It involves a technology called 5G and we have been trying to discuss it a bit over the past few months with some of our duty experts. But as good fortune had it, I had the opportunity to sit with someone who is deeply knowledgeable on the subject and has not only ideas that can inform the rest of us about the stakes involved in this 5G battle space, but also how American might prevail in a coming and very momentous, well, contest I guess is one way of putting it, with communist China over who will define and ultimately control this important new technology. His name is Declan Ganley. He is the chairman and CEO of Rivada Networks. He is, among other things, a man whose technologies and knowledge of, among other things, emergency deployable communications systems has prompted accolades from folks like the state of Louisiana who he helped dramatically with emergency coms in Hurricane Katrina and in its aftermath. He has represented Rivada Networks in testimony before the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce, talking about, among other things, emergency communications. I couldn’t have been more pleased to get a briefing from him informally over dinner at least and wanted very much to have him share his insights with our audience and he has graciously given us a full hour of his time for this purpose. Declan Ganley, thank you so much for doing so and welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. Great to have you.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Thank you. Great to be on with you, Frank.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, maybe just a word about your background. I know I’ve done very short shrift of it, but tell us what brings you to the level of expertise you clearly have with respect to 5G and then we’ll talk about what the devil it is.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Well, I can’t claim that it was a plan, Frank. It’s – sort of, you know, I stumbled from one thing to another through an entrepreneurial career that led me into the pointy end of the wireless industry. I – Rivada Networks is an American company. Our largest presence is actually in northern Virginia and Washington, DC metro area, but we have other offices around the US. I am Irish. I’m one of the few Irish members of the Rivada team. And indeed our board is made up of people that includes former chairman of the joint chiefs at the US military and other great people as well. But what brought me to this was, well, it started many, many years ago, back in the late 80s. I was in the Irish Army National Guard in the artillery. I was a communicator. I was also a radio hobbyist. I used to build my own radios in my spare time with an uncle of mine. And after I finished school in Ireland, left Ireland in 1987, ended up working in a lot of other countries. And amongst other things, set up a starting company that was hiring engineers, communications engineers, out of the Royal Signals Corps, and staffing them to the first cellular network build in the UK, which was in the early 1990s. And I ended up bidding for the second cell phone license in Ireland in 1995. I was backed by Comcast in that at the time. They partnered with me. Ralph Roberts was kind enough to support me as a young twenty-something year old with some big ideas. And we didn’t win that. That’s quite a story in itself of what happened, but what we did do then was I went on to found a company called Broadnet and did a rollup of fixed wireless licenses and rolled them out in ten countries in Europe, including the top forty-two towns and cities in Germany, the top fourteen in France and various others. I sold that business to Comcast. Founded Rivada after 9-11. My wife’s family business was in World Trade Center 2. My wife is a New Yorker. One of my brother-in-laws was a New York firefighter. His radio failed on 9-11. And so I thought – I wanted to look at how I could bring this broadband expertise and apply it initially to the public safety space, which threw me into the US industry, the US wireless industry. I founded Rivada and ended up developing technology for what’s called ruthless pre-emption, so that you can share radio spectrum resources. That perhaps the government has, for example, but the government would have priority use or ruthless pre-emption, while sub-priority users could use it on a commercial basis, which would be great for the economy. We invented that technology, spectrum sharing technology, got the US and global patents for it. And ended up patenting and inventing the technology to turn radio spectrum into a commodity that could be sold in an open-access marketplace in the same way the electricity markets worked. Now, while this may sound quite nerdy, it really is key to allowing for the success of the US and the West in the 5G domain, because 5G is all about spectrum sharing, capacity for sharing, and what China has done is quite cynically but opportunistically has used the weakness of the old model for allocating spectrum in the West, which was these one-off auctions that gave – giving it to, you know, two or three big carriers in each country and turning those carriers into what economists would call rent seekers. That they don’t actually invent technology themselves, they don’t really innovate, they sit there and say, this is the price, take it or leave it, for capacity. And the Chinese have hacked that.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And Declan, you’ve put an enormous amount of information on the table, particularly about things we’re going to talk about in the coming segments, but thank you for helping us calibrate on what is clearly a personal history of entrepreneurialism, yes, of course, but also innovation, that I think is precisely what this topic demands and why I was so keen to have you on to talk in some detail about what’s going on here. So having introduced the topic of 5G, could you just elaborate a little bit further on what exactly it is. I’m among many – I’m sure virtually everybody in our audience who has a cell phone that uses a 4G system, which not so long ago replaced the 3G system as I recall, is this like 3 and 4G? Or is this something altogether different and is it just for cell phones or is it a lot more than that?

DECLAN GANLEY:

It’s a hundred times faster than 4G, than what you’re – what you’re used to with 4G networks.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

But I can’t talk any faster. How will that make a difference? [LAUGHTER] It’s all pretty much the same speed. Actually, what I have to do is I have to stop talking for just a moment. We’re going to take a brief pause. When we come back, we’ll get a further explanation of what 5G is, how it works, and what it might mean for you as well as for the United States of America. We’ll be talking about that and much more for the remainder of this hour with Declan Ganley, right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back. We are joined for this full hour, I’m very pleased to say, by Declan Ganley, a man I met last week in New York in a totally different context, but discovered in the course of a marvelous dinner conversation his expertise in, his engagement on, and his profound concerns about what’s going on in a battle space most of us have never heard of called 5G. And, Declan, before the break you were telling us about what 5G is and I was forced to interrupt you before you even began.

DECLAN GANLEY:

So 5G is wireless communication standard. It’s about a hundred times faster than 4G in terms of download speeds. Now, what does that mean? Well, of course, it means you could download a miniseries on, you know, Band of Brothers from Netflix, you know, in zip time. And so many other things. But the real significance of 5G is that it’s going to change – it’s the biggest change in wireless standards and technology really since the introduction of the first cell phones. So this is a massive leap forward in terms of standards and capability. Now, what that also means is it means it dramatically changes and forces the change for business models. Because there’s going to be huge volumes of capacity, bytes available on these networks. These networks, if done properly, will be ubiquitous and we will rely on them for everything. So, you know, remotely controlling air conditioning for our cars and trucks, for, you know, cooling systems for food storage, for the way that, you know, our groceries are distributed for agricultural use. For all areas of transport for the economy and our day-to-day lives, health monitoring, the disbursement of pharmaceuticals, of drugs, for security, for public safety, every aspect of our lives. So 5G’s going to touch everybody and it’s going to be something that you’ll find really difficult to live without, frankly, once it’s introduced and the economy becomes dependent on it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That’s the thing I want to get at, then, because if it becomes difficult to live without it, or more to the point, it becomes necessary for life, literally, in terms of all of the, well, the internet of things, all of the things that will become dependent upon that, wireless communications and operations, if it is in unfriendly hands, I assume, Declan, that that makes possibly this a life and death issue. Is that conceivable?

DECLAN GANLEY:

It does. And let me put that into a bit of context. So the internet of things, some people hear the internet of things, the IOT, what does that mean? Think about it this way. It’s potentially millions of connected devices per square mile. That’s what the internet of things is. And all of those devices moving sometimes tiny bits of information in real time across these networks. And it’s going to make life – the quality of life better. Believe me, it will make the quality of life better, there’ll be all sorts of great things you can do in terms of health monitoring, lots and lots of other things. However, that is also what I have called the deep blue ocean of the cyber domain. When you hear about, you know, cyber technologies, the cyber space, there are five domains now of strategic power projection. There’s land, sea, air, space, and cyber. And the cyber domain, the deep blue ocean of the cyber domain, will be these 5G networks, because everything that will touch with them. Now, there’s ways that we’re conditioned traditionally to think about, for example, military power projection is the delivery of kinetic, of kinetic force. So, you know, putting metal on a target. Well, you don’t need to do that. If you can shut down the power station or knock out a grid or cause a detonation of something without having to send metal through the air, if you can do that by triggering a series of events in the cyber domain, that’s obviously a much more deadly and indeed a much more efficient way of delivering the impacted ill intent of having kinetic effect. So we need to make sure that the deep blue ocean of the cyber domain is in safe hands in the same way that we need to make sure our oceans are in safe hands. Now remember, the cyber domain’s going to enter into our very homes, so not to scaremonger, but let me give you, you know, one example. If you – if somebody were able to hack a device and turn up everybody’s air conditioning in New York City by three degrees at the same time, you would knock out the power grid in New York completely. And you could keep doing that and cause massive knock-on or rolling blackouts and all sorts of other – I won’t get into the other bad things that you could do on a public radio source or open source, but there are – you want to make sure that this domain is secure. And one of the really basic things to get right about this is making sure that the architecture, the equipment that this network runs on comes from, is designed by, and operated by friendlies. And the Chinese government has stated publicly, this isn’t a secret, that in their 2025 plan, their digital belt road plan, that they want to dominate and control the cyber domain, the 5G cyber domain. It is their stated strategic objective. And the tools that they are using there are two state-controlled companies, they claim that they’re private but they’re not, one of them is run by a retired general and ultimately president for life, Xi gets to use these companies as an extension of Chinese foreign policy and that is Huawei and ZTE.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Right. We’re going to come back to the Chinese in just a moment, but I’m very concerned, Declan, about the existing grid, I must tell you, and its vulnerability to a host of, well, cyber, but also other disruptive techniques that could bring our society to a screeching halt. What you’re describing is a new order of magnitude problem, perhaps, but I think it’s important to note that this problem is with us to some degree at least with respect to the grid, but – but what 5G seems to portend is that the degree of penetration into our society through unfriendly hands, if you will, is vastly greater than can even be contemplated today with all of the hackers and, you know, their theft of personal information and access to the electric grid and so on. Is that fair?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Yeah, I put it simply, it’s not just a matter of handing over the keys, it’s, you know, it’s buying the lock off the guy that wants to pick your lock. And having, you know, that – the lock picker be the supplier of your lock. That’s, in cyber terms, the degree of threat that we’re facing. And by the way, the economic contribution of these 5G networks, if you roll out 5G on what they call open access terms or you have a wholesale market for 5G, it will add at least 0.75 percent per year to US GDP, for example. So almost one percent a year. This will be a big shot in the arm if done properly for the US economy. And will in itself be a huge jobs creator. And that’s the other thing. If the world goes the Chinese route for 5G, you will not see that kind of economic impact take place.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

No. In this country at least. So Declan, I’m going to come back to the United States in the next segment, but let’s just drill down on what China’s doing. You’ve mentioned two companies, Huawei and ZTE. We’ve talked a lot about them on this program because they’re already in our knickers, I think it’s fair to say. We’ve had the US government increasingly concerned about the presence of their telecommunication systems, even in government, let alone, you know, in private hands. And they are increasingly using those opportunities for access to information and data to engage in espionage. Hence, we had at least a bit ago some significant sanctions levied by President Trump against ZTE. I guess he walked them back a bit. We’ve had instructions to US government purchasing agencies that you’re not supposed to buy kit from these folks. But these are companies that you’re saying would in the next iteration of technology, all other things being equal, have the position, the capabilities to do vastly more harm to us, not just economically, but in terms of national security as well. Is that correct?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Yes. Think about it this way. You know, President Xi and the communist party of China has got enormous power over those, really, instruments of Chinese state policy, those companies. They can’t say no to their ultimate bosses, to, you know, the president for life.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Even if they wanted to and there’s no evidence that they wanted to, right?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Yeah, exactly. So if you look at a map of the world right now in terms of China’s 5G, you know, strategy, and what it’s been doing with digital belt and road, there’s something like fifty-eight countries that have already signed up with China. So, you know, just this morning there’s breaking news in Business Korea that one of the carriers in South Korea is saying that they’re going to have to use Huawei equipment in their 5G network. Which really beggars belief. This is – now, to give credit to Australia, big story in the Sydney Morning Herald just yesterday, that the Aussies are, you know, strengthening their ban on the Chinese equipment manufacturers for 5G. They’re not going to allow them in. The former head of Australian intelligence services made some very interesting comments on that just yesterday. So the places with bans in place or de facto plans in place have been, are Australia, the US, and South Korea was one and so was India. But the Chinese have managed to roll those back in India and now it looks like South Korea, just yesterday South Africa announced that it was going to allow Huawei to deploy 5G in one of the 5G networks in South Africa. A couple of weeks ago, Turkey announced, the week before that Saudi Arabia announced. These are, you know, serious allies of the West who are rolling over to this Chinese onslaught.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Fascinating and very worrying stuff and I’m looking forward to continuing this important conversation with our guest, Declan Ganley, right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. We are having an extraordinarily consequential, I hope, certainly important conversation with Declan Ganley, a man who has spent much of his life, a remarkably successful career in business, working in the communications sector in various capacities. He has become one of the go-to guys with respect to emergency communications among other things. He is also, I think, a duty expert on the challenge we will be facing in the very, very near future perhaps as soon as next spring from communist China over control of this new, powerful communications technology known as 5G. And, Declan, you have been talking about what the Chinese have been doing, essentially, to roll up even nations that are supposed to be our friends that have, with the notable exception of Australia, chosen to allow Chinese, Huawei, ZTE technology and 5G networking into at least part of their communications infrastructure as part of evidently this stated ambition of China by 2025 to dominate 5G worldwide. Before we get into where we stand in this competition, if there is one, give us a quick insight, based on your own personal experience with the United Kingdom what happens once the Chinese have gotten, as you might say, inside the wire?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Well, the way they get into the wire is they come in, they’ll fund, they’ll put a few million into whatever is a leading university in any given country. They’ll drop a few million into a study. They will approach the mobile carriers, the incumbents in that country, all of whom are struggling, because they all have the bad business model. Their business model is based on retail cell phone coverage. Here’s the price, take it or leave it, you know, sixty bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month, whatever it may be. And the Chinese know that these guys are all economically vulnerable. So they go to them and they offer them very soft financing terms and heavily discounted pricing on the equipment. And therefore, nobody else can compete. And those carriers are looking to find margins somewhere and they find margin in cheap financing and cheap equipment costs. So in the UK, the Chinese went to the mobile carriers. Because the Chinese aren’t going to come and lobby Number 10 Downing Street themselves. They don’t fly somebody over from Beijing. They have somebody show up that went to Eton with the, you know, the deputy minister, exactly, who will do their, who carries the water for them. Not intentionally, but they’re doing it to try and keep their company in business. And they lobby. So in the UK, for example, what happened with 5G is Huawei did use one, in particular, of the carriers, I won’t name them, but now it’s not just that one anymore, there have been more of them, but one carrier went in and lobbied to save a few tens of millions of pounds and lobbied the government. Over the objections of some elements of the intelligence services.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

The rather strenuous objections as I understand it.

DECLAN GANLEY:

 Exactly. And what happened was they were thrown a sop. And we’ve seen this happen in Canada and the Chinese have tried to argue this in Australia where the Chinese will say, we’ll set up a lab and we’ll fund it and you can test all of our equipment and you can see that there’s nothing there. And then you can deploy our equipment knowing that our equipment is safe and secure. But of course, that doesn’t catch – it only catches a tiny fraction of the potential gaps. It doesn’t address the core risks at all. So this is the so-called consolation prize that is given to the intelligence services in any given country. Oh, you have this lab where they send the equipment in first. Now, those labs are finding lines of codes that can’t be explained and other things that I won’t go into, but at that point, the Chinese are in with the carrier, they do the financing deal, they sign the contract and they start rolling out the equipment. And what’s happened in the UK is they’ve realized too late what the risks are. And once you’ve done this, once you’ve got a little bit pregnant with these networks, it’s very, very hard, it’s kind of like getting dental implants, right? Your jaw’s being drilled, you’ve got the new implants in, and now someone’s coming along and telling you, well, you have to take them all out. I’m sorry. It’s really – it’s much harder to do a rip and replace after they’ve gone in than banning them or keeping them out before they get in. This has happened in the UK, it’s going to happen in other countries. It’s not to say you can’t do rip and replace, you can, but it is more expensive.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And this really underscores the point that you’ve made and others have on our program, this is, in fact, a plan for serving up this digital infrastructure which, once people are hooked into, will in fact be essentially a permanent arrangement dominated by the Chinese. And again, just talk us through why would the British intelligence service feel so strongly that this should not be done in the United Kingdom? What does it mean – again, we’ve talked a little bit about the internet of things and you’re not wanting people controlling your washing machine and your refrigerator and your air conditioning or your grid, but from an intelligence and national security point of view, what is at stake if the Chicoms are in charge?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Security. It’s the primary role of government. The first thing that they’re there and paid to do, which is guarantee our security and safety. And if you cannot protect your citizenry, your population, your property, from being spied upon and compromised and damaged, then you ain’t doing your job.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. So quite apart from state secrets and intelligence capabilities and national security, weapons systems and the like, all of which the Chinese are, of course, aggressively seeking to compromise, you’re talking about at the very basic level the safety of the population is in peril if this is allowed to proceed.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Right. The next great war – and God forbid that there would be one – but if there is, and the arc of history suggests that there will be, and if there is, the first ten minutes of the next great war will be fought in the cyber domain. And that will be the Pearl Harbor moment. And that will set the tone and it will set the whole strategy for how the next four or five years of that great war will play out. The cyber domain is where the first strikes will take place. It’s not going – it’s probably not going to be intercontinental ballistic missiles that can be spotted by satellites. It’s going to be kinetic effect can now be delivered through networks. And you can have massive effect. That’s where it will take place. That’s what these guys are worried about.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Indeed. Which brings us to the, really, most important point, which is, so where is the United States in this battle space? We certainly have impressive technologies. Al Gore, after all, invented the internet. So we ought to know something about all of this. What is going on that the Chinese seem to be stealing such a march on us and is it as bad as all of that, as you see it, and likely to come to a head as we discussed over dinner the other night, very quickly?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Look, the Chinese think the game is over. There’s something called Mobile World Congress, which is the big global jamboree for the wireless industry, which is taking place in Barcelona at the end of February. And the Chinese are already planning their pavilions, they’ve got the space rented to have their victory party with all of these countries that they will have signed up for their 5G solution. What they have used is they have used the carriers, these struggling mobile carriers in all of those countries, as their Trojan horses. This strategy was written about by Homer. It’s the oldest trick in the book. They’ve used the carriers as the Trojan horses to deliver this outcome. What can America do about it? It can flip the model on the Chinese. Arthur Herman from the Hudson Institute wrote a – really, the definitive piece so far in yesterday’s Forbes Online about how America can, at this final hour as we go into what we call injury time, how America can flip the table on the Chinese. And the way you do that is you change the business model. And you change the business model away from carrier-centric, retail-centric networks, to wholesale 5G carrier-neutral networks that allow all of these little millions of devices per square mile, that allow wholesale users to buy capacity in a marketplace in the same way the electricity markets work, so that you open up what’s called price discovery. Now, let me tell you why that matters. What the Chinese strategy requires is carriers to carry their water because the carriers want to prop up the price that they’re getting for capacity. What an open access market does is it dramatically drops the price of capacity. That destroys the Chinese business model, cause the repayments of the Chinese financing or those that co-finance with the Chinese are dependent upon price being maintained, price of capacity, at a predictable level. If you flip the model and go wholesale carrier-neutral 5G, then you destroy the Chinese business model and you can roll back the Chinese across huge parts of the world. And America, still at this final hour, can still win this 5G war by flipping the table. There’s discussions about an RFP possibly in the Forbes article being put out by DOD, NTIA has a very key role to play in the US in this also. If the US puts out an RFP –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That would be a request for proposal.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Yeah, a request for proposal to do this and it signals to the world the future of 5G is going carrier-neutral wholesale, that will absolutely slam the brakes on the Chinese. Cause everybody else will put their plans on hold and will wait to see how this plays out in the US. It needs to be awarded really before Mobile World Congress, which is at the end of February, and if that’s done, the Chinese march on 5G will be halted and rolled back.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, this is heartening, to say the least. I’m a great admirer, as you obviously are, of Arthur Herman, and I commend to all of our listeners actually two articles. There was the most recent one, “America’s 5G Rendezvous with Destiny”, published on Monday in Forbes. And one a week or so before, entitled “The War for the World’s 5G Future.” We have to take one last break, Declan Ganley. We’ll be right back with more. Right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back with this remarkably informative conversation with Declan Ganley, a man who has had long experience in the telecommunications business, including mobile and wireless networks and who is very seized with the problem of 5G and the prospect that we may lose permanently the ability to both compete with and protect ourselves from predations through this technology by communist China. And Declan, I did want to give you an opportunity to make a disclaimer here. I gather you are something of an interested party in this coming out right. Just tell us a little bit about that before we move on.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Most certainly. As I said at the outset of the program, I’m an entrepreneur in the wireless space and CEO of Rivada Networks. And Rivada holds a lot of key patents around 5G technology. Indeed I suppose we’ve been paid the backhanded compliment of seeing that some of that IT is not surprisingly being violated by some parties that are very relevant to this discussion right now. This is American technology. It holds the answer to how to do 5G vastly more efficiently than previous technologies. And so Rivada Networks has invented and developed those technologies and does intend to roll them out globally.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So the point here is that if the market conditions are right for American technology to compete effectively, yours and presumably others are more than up to the challenge of the Chinese. This isn’t one of those beta format versus VHS where one was clearly superior and run the rest out of town.

DECLAN GANLEY:

No, not only is ours better, but ours is being copied. We’re not copying them.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Ripped off, in other words. As is the Chinese wont. So this brings me to the last couple of questions that I wanted to get to with you, Declan, and that is there are clearly people in the United States government who are seized with this problem. I’ve spoken with some of them. I think the president himself has evinced concern about it. There was talk not so long ago about nationalizing 5G and thereby enabling us to compete effectively against the Chinese. I get the impression that that didn’t work out so well. But tell us exactly where this stands right now. You mentioned an RFP by the Defense Department and maybe you can explain why the Defense Department rather than sort of the whole of government approach is sensible.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Well, first of all, let me address the nationalizing story that came out in January. That was a gross misrepresentation of what was being proposed at the time. I had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days after that whole nationalization spin was launched. Frankly, that was the swamp reacting to what I now understand was a very, very early stage draft, that discussion document, that was leaked in order to try and throw a spanner in the works.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

There are a lot of other interested parties who would have that very much at stake, right?

DECLAN GANLEY:

That want to slow this all down and, of course, you know, slowing it down just gives China the time to roll up these countries as they’re doing week by week. In terms of the DOD, it’s not for me to say where an RFP should come from, obviously. The DOD is where the spectrum is. It’s, you know, in the old – the old joke about, you know, Jesse James, when asked why did he rob banks, he said, cause that’s where the money is. The DOD is where the spectrum is. They have uses for that spectrum, so they can’t be expected to just give it up. But they have shown a willingness and an openness publicly to, you know, sharing. To allowing sub-priority use to that spectrum for commercial use.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah, I’m sorry, define that term. Because that’s a critical piece of this, isn’t it? Sub-priority use as – we’re national security-minded folks here at Secure Freedom Radio. The use by the Defense Department of spectrum for critical national security purposes is pretty high priority, I think, for us. Sub-priority use means what, exactly, in this context?

DECLAN GANLEY:

So think about it this way. So government has spectrum of its own. All of it comes under the NTIA, ultimately. And the spectrum that’s in DOD is used by DOD for various missions. But if you think about it, it’s very rarely used, so this spectrum blankets the country, but for 99.999 percent of the time, it’s not being used at any given moment, so it’s sitting there, fallow, but when they need it, they absolutely need it on a non-negotiable basis.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

What would that do for an internet of things that’s governed by this if suddenly DOD says, sorry, we have a war on, we need that spectrum?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Well, I would say that they would, you know, that their need would be more pressing at that given moment. But even in those circumstances, the number of users that you can put on the volume of spectrum that they have is millions and millions and millions of simultaneous users. So their need, while always being prioritized, even then, in those very, very rare circumstances, they wouldn’t necessarily use all of the capacity everywhere. They’d use some of the capacity in specific areas. But their use of the network, it should feel to them like no one else is on it. And that’s what we call ruthless pre-emption. So they have whatever they need, whenever they need it, wherever they need it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And you’ve had experience making this work. I just – I want to press you on this because if life depends upon 5G, would the people who are using 5G know that somebody is using some of that bandwidth if it’s being pre-empted ruthlessly by the Defense Department?

DECLAN GANLEY:

Well, not to get into the weeds too much on how the technology works, but if you were a casual observer from the outside, you don’t know who’s using it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

But is your service going to be interrupted? Will your ability to live life with your machines all not talking at all be affected?

DECLAN GANLEY:

The first things that would be slowed down might be, you know, the number of pixels on your kids’ video game at any given moment. So you have tiers of prioritization. So you have very high priority stuff at the top that doesn’t get kicked off or gets kicked off absolutely last and you have low priority stuff which basically most traffic is low priority, that’s the traffic that would be pushed off first in those types of scenarios. But as I say, they would be very, very rare.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Something within the competency of the 5G network to manage. Let me ask you very quickly one other thing, Declan. At CPAC in February, I had two chaps turn up to be interviewed by my who were very concerned about health-related implications of 5G, saying the amount of energy that is going to be transmitted by the various transformers, I guess, that are outside of your home would be very, very problematic to brain health and the like. You suggested that that was not so when we spoke over dinner. Tell us the answer.

DECLAN GANLEY:

Look, I mean, look – and I understand people are always concerned about new things. I remember when cellular technology came out first, I was in Europe working on it and people said, you know, crows were falling dead from the sky having been sort of nuked by these new masts, which just wasn’t true. This is non-ionizing radiation. It’s not the kind of radiation that damages cell tissue. But very importantly, if there was any truth to these theories, then every navy ship, every sailor that ever set sail in the US Navy, the Royal Navy, and any other number of navies for the last sixty years, would all have been destroyed by this stuff, because the power that they’re putting out in these same frequencies are far greater than anything that would be deployed in a civilian context. Also, earlier generations of radio technology had to transmit on far greater power because the distances that they were covering were far greater. With 5G, the distances are much, much shorter, so you don’t need anything like the same amount of power.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Okay. So, to close up, we have a window of opportunity here between now and February.

DECLAN GANLEY:

We have a window of opportunity between now and the end of November because to affect the February outcome the decision needs to have already been made. That requires a process. That process would need to start in November.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

The process would start with a request for proposal from the Defense Department which would receive a proposal and make an award by the end of November, did you say?

DECLAN GANLEY:

No, I think realistically that would need to be the end of January or February.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Okay. But have that award in place going into that conference in Barcelona and to stave off possibly irreversible decisions locking in Chinese control of the 5G network for the foreseeable, if not permanent future. Declan Ganley, thank you for walking us through this in such a thorough and informative way. I am very grateful to you for your time today as well as for the leadership you’re providing in this space. And we look forward to further updates with you and hopefully Arthur Herman in the very near future as time is clearly of the essence. Keep up the good work, my friend, at Rivada Networks and come back to us again soon. I hope the rest of you will come back to us again tomorrow. Same time, same station. Until then, this is Frank Gaffney. Thanks for listening.