NTIA Blog

On November 15th, 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law. Better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the statute designated $65billion to improve high-speed Internet access for people across America. 

Two years later,NTIA and other agencieshave distributed billions of dollarsto communities to bridge the digital divide and make participation in the digital economy a reality for everyone.At NTIA, we completed funding rounds for multiple programs in the last year and are moving to the implementation phase, all the while preparing states and territories to administer their state grant programs. Here are some of our major accomplishments in Year 2 of Internet for All, from major milestones to stories of how this initiative is impacting people’s lives.

Moving the BEAD Program from Planning to Execution

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program will only succeed if every penny is wisely spent. This includes ensuring that subgrantees have the capacity  not just to  build and deploy high-speed Internet networks but to operate those networks for years to come, delivering Internet connectivity to areas that for too long have been left behind.

We loved Digital Inclusion Week so much that we couldn’t just celebrate for seven days—so we decided to celebrate for a whole month instead. 

As part of this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we at NTIA are taking a moment to reflect on our collective achievements and the crucial work that lies ahead of us to ensure that the Internet remains open, free, and secure.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)'s $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act Programs are critical for communities in need of access to affordable, reliable, high-speed Internet – an essential service in an increasingly digital world.

At the National Telecommunications and Information Administration we are working to foster the development of an open 5G wireless ecosystem to help the private sector bring new life and innovation to a marketplace held back by few vendors and little competition.  

One way we’re doing this is through our 5G lab at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, where we partnered with the Department of Defense for our 2023 5G Challenge. The 2023 5G Challenge tested whether an open 5G ecosystem can work in real world scenarios.

Challenge Structure Recap 

These results are now available in the 2023 5G Challenge Closing Ceremony video

The 2023 5G Challenge tested whether components of an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), such as antennas and radio base stations, can work together to ultimately create a multi-vendor subsystem end-to-end (E2E) 5G network. 

The upcoming Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kyoto, Japan will unfold amidst two major Internet governance milestone events. It will come on the heels of a preparatory ministerial meeting for next year’s Summit of the Future, where the Global Digital Compact is envisioned to be agreed to, and in advance of the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20). 

In August, I had the pleasure of visiting Totelcom’s offices and training facilities in De Leon, Texas. Totelcom is a family-owned, rural telecom provider that serves De Leon—with a population of just over 2,000—and the surrounding communities. As we pulled up after the two-hour drive from Dallas, the company’s digital reader board displayed a temperature of 112 degrees.  

At the National Telecommunications and Information Administration we’re working to catalyze the development of an open 5G wireless ecosystem to help the private sector move away from a highly consolidated marketplace with few vendors and technologies.

For NTIA, one of the primary focuses for cybersecurity work is maintaining the openness of the Internet and its potential for innovation and further technological development. Those priorities can apply to cybersecurity policy efforts in a variety of different ways.