NTIA Blog

The 67 students at Silverton School, nestled in the mountains of Colorado’s San Juan County, are returning from winter break to an abundance of new educational resources.

The students of Silverton School
(click to enlarge)

Thanks to a grant from NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), Silverton School is now linked to a high-speed fiber-optic network that will deliver broadband speeds of 100 megabits per second to the small K-12 institution.

The new connection is an important milestone for EAGLE-NET Alliance, a Colorado intergovernmental entity that is leveraging federal funding to supply broadband to schools, libraries, government facilities and other anchor institutions across the state. And it is a big victory for local stakeholders, including Silverton Public Schools and San Juan County’s Board of County Commissioners.

Silverton – with a winter population of between 400 and 500 and a summer population that can reach 1,000 - is the last county seat in Colorado to connect to a fiber-optic system. With EAGLE-NET Alliance now bringing 20 gigabits of bandwidth into the community, Silverton hopes last-mile broadband providers will be able to hook up local businesses and homes in 2016.

Since its creation in 2004, the Spectrum Relocation Fund (SRF) has served as an important tool supporting federal agency efforts to make more spectrum available for commercial use. The fund reimburses agencies for some of the costs they incur for repurposing the spectrum they use in performing critical missions on behalf of the American people, opening the door to commercial access to the spectrum.

Modifying agency communications systems to use a different spectrum band or perhaps share spectrum with commercial providers can be exceedingly costly, and agencies typically do not have adequate budgets to cover all the costs associated with such efforts. Congress created the SRF to help defray the costs associated with spectrum relocation or sharing. It supports the efforts of federal agencies as they work to help meet the President’s goal of identifying 500 megahertz of additional federal and non-federal spectrum for wireless broadband services, both licensed and unlicensed, by 2020.

For many Americans, the days of connecting to the Internet solely through a stationary desktop computer are over. Going online now means shopping on a tablet, using a PlayStation to watch movies, or checking email on a smartphone.

Even at the epicenter of the high-tech revolution, there are digital haves and have-nots.

NTIA hosted a broadband workshop last week at the Computer History Museum in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. And the take-away was this: the state that gave us semiconductor chips, Internet search engines and smartphones faces the same digital divide challenges as the rest of the nation.

The Bay Area may be home to technology giants such as Intel, Google and Apple. But in the remote reaches of rural Humboldt County, there are tribal lands that still lack basic communications infrastructure. And in the desert towns of the Coachella Valley, there are students who can’t get online to do homework since there is no Internet access in the mobile home communities where they live.

NTIA has long noted disparities in Internet use based on race and ethnicity, among other demographics. While the United States has made great strides in recent years to close the digital divide, the latest NTIA data on Internet and computer use suggest that gaps remain among certain groups.

In an important step to making more spectrum available for commercial use, NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) recently launched a new online site that enables commercial entities and federal agencies to coordinate spectrum use in the 1695-1710 MHz band, one of three bands recently made available by auction for Advanced Wireless Services (AWS). The new NTIA portal fulfills an important requirement to enable sharing in the 1695-1710 MHz portion of this prime spectrum. 

Although many federal incumbents will eventually relocate out of the AWS bands, relocation is not feasible for agencies that operate meteorological satellite Earth stations in the 1695-1710 MHz band. To make this band available for sharing, the Federal Communications Commission devised rules that require commercial auction winners to successfully coordinate with federal incumbents prior to operating in geographic areas (coordination zones) around these stations, which will continue to operate indefinitely.

This is part of a series of blogs highlighting how federal agencies use spectrum to carry out important missions for the American people.

This blog post was cross-posted at NASA’s website.

Orbiting 250 miles overhead and circling the Earth every 90 minutes, the International Space Station (ISS) serves as an outpost for exploration and scientific discovery. For 15 years, humans have been living continuously aboard the space station and making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. A truly global endeavor, more than 200 people from 15 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 1,700 research investigations from researchers in more than 83 countries.

External image of the International Space Station showing SCAN Testbed installed on the nadir side (Image credit: NASA)

Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted what many already knew: high-speed internet access is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.

We all rely on clocks to figure out when to leave for work, go to school and to do a myriad of other activities that make up our daily lives. But how we keep track of time on those clocks is a subject of debate among the nations of the world. Most countries use the international standard time scale called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NTIA’s sister agency, maintains the UTC time scale in the United States.

UTC is based on atomic clocks, which use the international definition of the “second” to keep highly accurate and very steady track of time.  Atomic clocks have been used for time-keeping services since the 1950s. Traditional clocks are based on astronomical measures of the Earth’s rotation. The Earth’s rotation rate is slowing down over time, however, and the rate of that slowdown is irregular. To keep UTC in line with the Earth’s rotation, a second is added to UTC time when needed to ensure that the difference between traditional clocks and atomic clocks is less than a second. One of these seconds, a so-called “leap second,” was most recently added at the end of June.  Since the leap second’s introduction in 1972, 26 leap seconds have been added to UTC to keep the world’s clocks in sync with the Earth’s rotation.

This post is part of our “Spotlight on NTIA” blog series, which is highlighting the work that NTIA employees are doing to advance NTIA’s mission of promoting broadband adoption, finding spectrum to meet the growing demand for wireless technologies, and ensuring the Internet remains an engine for innovation and economic growth.

Billy Kozma has lived on both the East and West coasts but appears to have found a place that finally feels like a good fit in Boulder, Colo. Kozma, a computer engineer at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, joined NTIA’s research lab in Boulder two-and-a-half years ago after working for more than two years as a computer engineer for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in Washington, D.C.

Kozma said he just couldn’t get used to living in the Washington, D.C., area and longed to move back West. Kozma lived in the Seattle area during a nearly two-year stint as a software engineer at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. While he loved living in the Seattle area, Kozma and his wife wanted to be closer to their Pennsylvania-based families, which is how he landed in Washington, D.C. In Boulder, he appears to have found a happy medium between his desire to be in a less populated place close to nature while not being too far from family.