India, July 9 -- Is Huawei's equipment secure or not? Right now, the answer to that question depends largely on who you ask.

But the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) trade group hopes to provide a definitive, unbiased answer, one backed up with details and specifics and one that everyone can agree on. To do so, the association is building a global standard and benchmarking tool that can measure the risks present in each vendor's supply chain in real-time, with the goal of testing third-party certifications starting in the middle of 2021.

"I'm not interested in blackballing a particular company," explained Ken Koffman, TIA's CTO and the executive leading the security effort.

Instead, Koffman explained that TIA's goal is to ...