The US Air Force aims to triple the number of bases where you can get a decent mobile phone connection from 10 to 30. The immediate plan is to upgrade 20 installations to 4G LTE networks — which, in turn, are the essential foundation for a future 5G system.
“We’re trying to put LTE and 5G on all the bases. We’ve succeeded with 10. We have [a Request For Quotations] for 20 more,” Frank Konieczny, Air Force chief technology officer, told a webinar sponsored by AFCEA DC. “That’s the first step: trying to get the infrastructure down.”
Commercial telecoms firms have until next Thursday to bid for “leases” to install cell towers and related systems at 20 bases across a swath of the US from Arizona to North Dakota, according to the recently updated Air Force request. In this initial stage, vendors will not be paid (with some limited exceptions) for building the infrastructure, just for services provided.
The planned leasing contracts will focus first on providing LTE cell services. That may change in the future, as the Air Force plan is to gradually upgrade coverage to 5G capability.
“Cellular coverage on Air Force bases varies widely from location to location; some have partial coverage throughout the base while others have none,” the solicitation states. “The goal is to team with commercial industry for the installation of additional cellular infrastructure to deliver expanded coverage and increased capacity on Air Force bases.”
The service plans to notify winners on Dec. 3.
The program is separate from the Air Force’s ‘Base of the Future’ effort focused on rebuilding Tyndall AFB in Florida after it was destroyed by Hurricane Michael in 2018. That initiative is aimed at re-creating Tyndall as a showcase for base modernization, complete with 5G connectivity and the use of highly automated computerized logistics based on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Brig. Gen. Patrice Melancon, who oversees the Tyndall project, told the webinar that a next step is standing up an ‘Installation Resiliency Operations Center,’ which will serve as a repository of data provided by a variety of system sensors on aircraft and within base infrastructure.
The center, she said, “will collect all that data and allow us to do kind of two primary things. The first is to allow us to really start moving towards condition-based maintenance of our built infrastructure and predictive maintenance of that built infrastructure.”
The Air Force base program also is different from the ongoing ‘5G to NextG’ initiative being led by DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Research & Engineering (OUSDR&E), although the service is a big player in that wider initiative. As Sydney reported last week, that experimental effort is designed to explore a number of ‘use cases’ for 5G networking — from enhancing mobility to base security to logistics management — and now encompasses 10 Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force bases.
Those experiments (being contracted in ‘tranches’) in fact make up only one prong of OSD’s three-tiered push for 5G capabilities, Dan Massey, a program lead at OUSDR&E, explained to the webinar.
“The 5G initiative, the ‘5G to NextG’ initiative, is really split into three key parts. The first part is is ‘Accelerate’,” he said. “Accelerate’s rolling out Tranche One and Tranche Two. Accelerate is really meant to, as the name implies, accelerate the use of 5G in DoD scenarios.”
The second piece, that Massey leads, is called ‘Operate Through,‘ and focuses on how DoD can utilize commercial networks rather than create its own separate ones. This not only includes looking at how the military can piggyback on US commercial networks, but also on allied networks and even networks in “gray zones” — both in peacetime and during combat operations.
The big issue for being able to safely conduct military operations over commercial 5G networks is security, Massey said. “This is true zero trust cybersecurity. I have limited, in fact zero, trust on the infrastructure in allied or even contested areas in terms of 5G, but maybe I can still make use of it.”
Finally, “the third leg of the stool is ‘Innovate.’ Because while we’re all focused on 5G, and we’ve got a lot of possibilities in 5G, we also know 5G is not an endpoint — there’s a continuation,” Massey said “So, what goes beyond 5G?”