Great find by @ScottEastman here: https://www.infer-pub.com/comments/134520 but more than a month has passed from that news and I haven't seen any Huawei remarks that they consider such a move as a solution (likely technical side of the process would take a long time).
That may not mean anything, but It looks to me as this talk about Huawei joining O-RAN to be able to stay in Germany came from Huawei clients rather than Huawei itself. However, it is important signal, since Huawei clients must have talked with the company about that option and it was publicly suggested as a way for Huawei to stay in Germany as a hardware provider.
According to this article western markets may not matter that much for Huawei and its biggest shareholder - the Chinese Government because the global market is big, and the company already handled the problem of being kicked out from the US and a few other western countries and is on the growth trajectory. One perspective is that for the Chinese government, with their global ambitions, Huawei might be worth more as an asset which can be used for espionage than just a source of income. From that point of view, keeping their own close source proprietary software seems like a much better move than joining O-RAN and allowing other countries to use other software providers with their equipment (see this article about technologies supposedly developed by Huawei - see the quote below since this is behind a paywall). Of course, I don't know Chinese decision makers preferences on that, but cases in which Huawei employees were accused of espionage activity (for example: link, link) or when the company was investigated for potentially malicious intent (link) strongly suggest that they do not see it only as a business.
Quotes from the Washington Post's article "Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programs" from December 14, 2021 mentioned above :
A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.
and:
The Huawei slides shed light on the company’s role in five surveillance activities in China: voice recording analysis, detention center monitoring, location tracking of political individuals of interest, police surveillance in the Xinjiang region, and corporate tracking of employees and customers.
I know that Laplace's Rule of Succession is overused in judgmental forecasting, but the formula might be some reference point if we can treat the process behind the event occurrence as having a constant probability in the analyzed period.
It is likely not constant, but as I see it, this is a decision which can be made at any point of time, so treating it as something with constant probability may be reasonable - do you agree?
I mainly object to using it in cases of forecasting related to evolving processes, where we in fact have more information indicating the progress of such process. Like for example, the company is developing a game, and it has been announced to be released on date X - then using this rule and taking the months or days between its initial announcement and today as time when it has not been released as a basis for our calculations of probability of its release is absurd. The probability cannot be the same for the first days after the announcement and the days around the date of its planned release. It would be more appropriate to look at the usual delays for previous productions of that studio, or delays of similar game projects by similar game studios. We could include cases of games which were never released for a separate probability of project being abandoned or the studio going bankrupt during the work on the project.
You may see this as obvious, but I have seen people I highly respect as forecasters using the Laplace's Rule like that - good forecasters can make mistakes too, I make mistakes not as rarely as I would want 😉 and I am very happy to learn from all of you, please let me know when you think you see a mistake in my thinking, knowledge, assumptions or calculations.
So, we've observed 78 months where the event didn't occur (since February 2018 when O-RAN started)
The number of successes (s) is 0
The number of trials (n) is 78
Applying the formula:
P(event occurs in a single month) = (0 + 1) / (78 + 2) = 1 / 80 = 0.0125
We want to know the probability of this event occurring at least once in the next 13 months (the time till end date). This is equivalent to 1 minus the probability of it not occurring in any of those 13 months:
P(event occurs in next 13 months) = 1 - P(event doesn't occur in next 13 months)
= 1 - (1 - 0.0125)^13 ≈ 15.09%
So, as I see it it can be triggered by Huawei announcement that they are testing or developing equipment with O-RAN standards, or making financial or resource commitments. It might be enough if Huawei declared that it is testing or checking the feasibility of such a solution, for example as a response to its German clients' demand, to resolve the question as "yes", since checking means resource commitment. I don't think it was an intent of the INFER Question Team to be that inclusive as I just described, but, I think we should take these possibilities into consideration.So, I don't think we are at the time of peak probability of that happening, the highest motivation for Huawei to join O-RAN was before they started to be removed from NATO countries (see this article: https://www.lightreading.com/5g/europe-s-inaction-on-huawei-may-have-come-at-the-worst-5g-time), and they were dismissive about O-RAN in the past in their official comments. Now the probability still might be a bit higher than for a random month because of what is happening in Germany - https://www.infer-pub.com/comments/134520 - but the lack of comments about that from Huawei in more than a month after the article still makes me think it is more probable that this is Huawei clients initiative which Huawei may not support. So that part of my last forecast stays the same: https://www.infer-pub.com/comments/137717
I changed my mind, updated my beliefs on several things:
1. The resolution criteria are quite broad and inclusive, and the threshold for a resolution as "yes" is lower than the title of the question suggests.
2. This article https://www.lightreading.com/5g/europe-s-inaction-on-huawei-may-have-come-at-the-worst-5g-time makes me update on the argument that Huawei may not want to resign from software because they would lose the opportunity for spying or sabotage:
3. Interesting article shared by @DimaKlenchin https://www.telecoms.com/telecoms-infrastructure/open-ran-is-failing-to-deliver-on-its-ultimate-promise showing that the idea of O-RAN might be losing its market attractiveness as it has not delivered what was promised: