NTIA Blog

This year’s International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technology (ISART) conference will take place Aug. 11-13 in Boulder, Colorado. The conference will focus on what a “zero trust” network environment means from a 5G perspective. The symposium, which is co-sponsored by NTIA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will include panel discussions, presentations, tutorials, and demonstrations from subject matter experts from U.S. and international organizations. Visit the ISART website for more information.

NTIA’s State Broadband Leaders Network is a powerful forum for connecting local government, industry and stakeholders across the country that are focused on broadband activities. NTIA has spent many years building up these relationships, and recently updated our website with detailed information on state broadband offices and funding opportunities. The SBLN also holds regular meetings for states to improve funding coordination, align policies, and address barriers to collaboration across states and agencies.

Meetings with state broadband leaders helps us gather valuable, on-the-ground data about specific broadband challenges. This work is playing an important role as NTIA continues to build out the National Broadband Availability Map.

We’re pleased to report that five new states have joined the initial eight states participating in our mapping program. The new participating states are Nebraska, New Mexico, Michigan, Missouri and Virginia. The eight initial states are California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

America’s technology leadership in secure and reliable 5G communications is critical to the nation’s economic and international competitiveness. Delivering on these goals, President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget calls for increased funding to modernize the nation’s spectrum management system; improve the security of our telecommunications infrastructure; and upgrade advanced communications research.

The budget would spend an additional $25 million to modernize the spectrum management system to accommodate advanced technologies. With these resources, NTIA will create a secure, flexible, and automated spectrum management system that would improve with the integrity and confidentiality of data; reduce “white space” between spectrum assignments; reengineer business processes; and automate workflows.

The budget also would add $3 million to for the Advanced Communications Research program at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, NTIA’s research lab in Boulder, Colorado. The funds would be used to replace equipment the lab uses for research and testing of 5G technologies to help the United States transition from 4G LTE. To improve NTIA’s ability to manage supply chain risks to our nation’s telecommunications infrastructure, the budget calls for an additional $2.1 million and six new positions.

Overall, the President’s FY2021 budget request for NTIA is $72.2 million.

Spectrum sharing strategies hold great promise for meeting the growing needs of commercial and federal users.  This is an area of intense study at NTIA as we seek to protect critical federal missions while enabling new commercial opportunities. As part of an assessment conducted with the Department of Defense, we are happy to announce significant progress in finding potential spectrum sharing options for the 3450-3550 MHz band, as outlined in a new technical report.

Federal operations in the 3450-3550 MHz band include shipborne, airborne, and land-based systems — primarily radars. Our report points to a clear possibility for real time spectrum sharing that would protect these critical missions, while providing attractive opportunities for commercial business. The report analyzes the potential for these federal systems to share spectrum with outdoor base stations, indoor access points, and mobile user equipment.

The report assesses two hypothetical commercial deployments, operating at various power levels, which industry has said would be desirable. The next step would be to study how often each of the federal systems actually is used, and then develop mechanisms for reliably informing commercial operations when federal systems are operating nearby.

As we close the books on 2019, NTIA took stock of strides made in the past year on key Administration priorities. Topping the list is our work to make spectrum available for 5G, including completing engineering work to put critical mid-band spectrum to use in the 3.5 GHz band. NTIA also is proud of our work with government partners to enhance broadband connectivity, improve technology equipment in 911 call centers, and secure networks from cyber threats.

Ensuring U.S. Leadership in 5G, Broadband Opportunities

NTIA took a number of steps to support the Administration’s goal to advance 5G leadership and expand broadband connectivity around the country. We worked with the Department of Commerce to take stock of our spectrum assets and plan for future needs. Nearly 5.9 gigahertz of spectrum has been made available for licensed wireless services, including 5G, according to our report on efforts to re-purpose spectrum for commercial use.

We were excited to see the long-awaited initial commercial deployments of broadband wireless services in the 3.5 GHz band, after years of groundbreaking engineering work and testing by NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management and the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences.

Participants in NTIA’s software security multistakeholder effort made significant progress this year, publishing the first set of community-drafted documents to offer guidance around the practice of a software bill of materials (SBOM). The SBOM functions as a “list of ingredients” for software that can help organizations keep track of the underlying components that make up almost all software today.

We are excited that the broader community is already using these resources, and we’re looking forward to refining the concept at the technical level. During the most recent meeting in November, the community agreed to continue their work in 2020, with a focus on making transparency an easy-to-use feature of the software marketplace.

Moving forward, in four parallel work streams, stakeholders plan to:

We’re excited to celebrate the quarter-century birthday of our partnership with the Census Bureau on a survey about consumer use of computers and the Internet! Last month, across all fifty states and the District of Columbia, Census interviewers talked to 52,000 households for this comprehensive survey, which collects data every two years on who goes online, what computing devices and technologies people use, and what challenges prevent some Americans from taking full advantage of the digital age.

The NTIA Internet Use Survey is unique among national household surveys in this field due to its combination of in-depth questions, a large sample size that enables demographic and state-by-state estimates, and use of Census Bureau expertise and resources.

The Census Bureau administers the NTIA Internet Use Survey as a supplement to its Current Population Survey (CPS), which serves as a source of some of our nation’s official labor force statistics, including the monthly national unemployment rate. The Census Bureau has been conducting the CPS every month since the 1940s. The CPS survey will help NTIA’s researchers gain insights on a range of demographic and labor force information in each of the surveyed households, in addition to the information yielded from the supplemental Internet Use Survey questions.

Every initiative to expand spectrum use and efficiency relies on predictions of how far a wireless signal will travel, or propagate, before interfering with another user or fading away. Unlocking the full potential of spectrum resources requires a deep understanding of radio wave behavior, and accurate propagation models, so that systems can be designed to coexist in a crowded environment.

High-precision measurements are key to creating and validating radio propagation models. NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) and its predecessors have been collecting measurement data for more than a century, creating a unique expertise in measurement science and techniques. Last year, NTIA released a technical memorandum on “Best Practices for Radio Propagation Measurements.”

Internet use among Hispanic Americans has continued to grow, according to NTIA data, narrowing a racial disparity that has existed since NTIA began tracking adoption through its Internet Use Surveys in 1998.

The proportion of Hispanic Americans using the Internet has risen from 61 percent in 2013 and 66 percent in 2015 to 72 percent in 2017, NTIA data show.

Although this is still less than the 80 percent of non-Hispanic Whites online in 2017, the gap has begun to narrow. Internet usage rates for Hispanics are now similar to African Americans, who have also experienced gains in Internet use in recent years (see Figure 1).

One of the most significant challenges to expanding broadband connectivity is determining which parts of the country remain unconnected. Getting this information would help states and local communities – and the providers they work with -- more accurately understand where new infrastructure is needed.

Last year, Congress asked NTIA to develop a National Broadband Availability Map to address this problem. Working with an initial group of eight states, we’ve released a pilot version of the map, a geographic information system platform that allows for the visualization of federal, state, and commercially available data sets. The map will be made available exclusively to state and federal partners, as it includes non-public data that may be business sensitive or have licensing restrictions.

The eight partner states include California, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Utah. These states participate in NTIA’s State Broadband Leaders Network, and have active broadband plans or programs. As the pilot moves forward, NTIA will test the map's functionality and expand it to other states, and add data from additional partners, federal agencies, industry and accessible commercial datasets.

The National Broadband Availability Map also includes data that the Federal Communications Commission collects twice a year, as well as other federal and non-federal datasets that can inform broadband planning and policy-making.