Former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler stressed the need to zero in on protecting 5G wireless networks from cyber threats in a new paper published Tuesday by the Brookings Institution.
The paper, co-authored by David Simpson, the former chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, makes the case for putting “equivalent – if not greater – focus on the security” of 5G networks as there is on the possibilities of the “connected future.”
“To build 5G on top of a weak cybersecurity foundation is to build on sand,” Wheeler and Simpson wrote in the paper. “This is not just a matter of the safety of network users, it is a matter of national security.”