NTIA Blog

This article is cross-posted on the OSTP blog

The President’s strategy for expanding the capacity of high-speed wireless broadband services across the Nation may get a boost from a new Defense Department Initiative to fund research and development of innovative new approaches to spectrum sharing.

Wireless technology continues to drive innovation and productivity in the United States, fueling economic growth and creating jobs.  By most measures, the United States leads the world in the development and deployment of cutting-edge wireless technologies.  More subscribers to advanced 4G wireless broadband live in the United States than in the rest of the world combined.   U.S. companies dominate the market for smartphone operating systems and online apps.  And the wireless industry contributes hundreds of billions of dollars to America’s gross domestic product.

As the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) nears completion, NTIA staff is continuing to work closely with our grantees to ensure that projects are wrapping up on time and within budget, delivering the promised broadband benefits to the communities they serve.

Ensuring projects meet their milestones and protecting taxpayer funds is of paramount importance to NTIA. Our staff performs extensive and diligent oversight and provides technical assistance to our recipients tailored to their needs. This oversight involves a significant level of effort, and requires our staff to sometimes take tough enforcement action to protect taxpayer funds.

NTIA oversees our projects in a number of ways. Staff remains in close and frequent contact with award recipients via regularly scheduled conference calls, email exchanges, drop-in calls on specific administrative or programmatic topics, and in-person conferences. These contacts serve as a means to reinforce the terms and conditions associated with each award and help ensure that NTIA quickly addresses challenges that arise. Additionally, recipients must report quarterly and annually to NTIA on key financial and programmatic activities. These reports are posted publicly and provide detailed information on progress in achieving program outcomes, use of funds, challenges faced, and expected future progress.  Finally, NTIA conducts site visits to projects and has conducted over 150 oversight visits representing more than 94 percent of BTOP federal award dollars.

To understand how rural South Dakota is, consider this: The state ranks 17th in the nation in terms of geographic size, but 46th in population - with fewer than 820,000 people, according to the 2010 Census. In some parts of South Dakota, the distance between farmsteads can be six miles. Cattle outnumber people four to one.

For telecommunications companies, the state’s sparse population means that there are not enough customers in many places to enable them to recoup costly investments in advanced telecommunications networks needed to deliver high-speed Internet service.

But even in the most remote corners of the country, access to broadband is becoming critical to fully participating in today’s digital society and information-age economy.

That’s why NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program awarded a $20.6 million grant to SDN Communications just over three years ago to bring broadband to parts of South Dakota that otherwise might never get it. The grant was one of the first to be announced in the $4 billion BTOP program, which is investing in roughly 230 projects nationwide that are building the technology infrastructure and skills that America needs to compete in the 21st century.

SDN Communications, a partnership of 27 independent telecom carriers covering 80 percent of South Dakota, is using its BTOP funding to expand its 1,850-mile, 800-gigabit fiber network by almost 400 additional miles and add an additional 100 gigabits of bandwidth along high-capacity routes.

Nearly two years ago, NTIA launched the National Broadband Map, and today we are updating it, as we have every six months since its inception.  The map provides the first-ever detailed datasets of broadband availability across the country, and it would not be possible without a unique partnership between the federal government, states, and the voluntary participation of many broadband providers. 

With funding from NTIA, made available by the Recovery Act, each state undertook a massive effort to locate broadband availability by census block, essentially dividing the country into more than 11 million distinct areas.  A census block is the smallest unit of geography for which population or other data are available, and on average has a population of about 28 people.  With these data, we can now see change at a granular and national level every six months.

NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) is hard at work in our Boulder, Colorado labs testing next-generation technology that will be used in a new nationwide public safety broadband network to be built by the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet).

Public Safety official participates in testing of digital LMR intelligibility.

Congress directed that the new FirstNet public safety network utilize Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio technology, a developing commercial network standard for broadband transmission. The public safety community identified LTE as the most promising technology to satisfy its growing need for advanced communications capabilities. As a result, ITS is exploring Voice over LTE(VoLTE), a digital protocol under which the network handles voice as just another form of data, over LTE networks. ITS is working with the public safety community to ensure that mission-critical voice transmission using this new technology is at least as clear to practitioners in field conditions as current technologies.

As 2012 draws to a close, I would like to take a moment to think back on some of the major things we’ve accomplished and then look forward to what we have on our plate for 2013.

Internet.  In 2012, NTIA kept busy on issues spanning all areas of communications.  On the Internet policy front, we focused on facilitating multistakeholder work on how mobile applications handle consumer data privacy.  I commend NTIA staff and all of the interested stakeholders for their tireless work – seven meetings and five stakeholder-organized tech briefings – over the last six months to proactively address this issue.  In addition to cultivating a multistakeholder model for consumer data privacy, we also devoted significant energy in 2012 to preserving the successful multistakeholder model for a free, open, and innovative Internet globally.  This culminated in an NTIA team putting their personal lives on hold for a month and dedicating 24/7 to activities in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT).  The WCIT failed to reach consensus on revising the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), but the U.S. delegation never wavered in its commitment to protecting the Internet from top-down government regulation. 

NTIA recently released the Third Interim Progress Report on the Obama Administration’s efforts to make available 500 megahertz of spectrum by 2020 for expanded wireless broadband use.

Tablet and smartphone use is growing at an astounding pace, revolutionizing the way Americans work and play by enabling anytime, anywhere accessibility to the Internet. This wireless broadband revolution enhances U.S. competitiveness, creates jobs and drives innovation.  It is triggering the creation of innovative new businesses, providing cost-effective connections in rural areas, increasing productivity, and improving public safety.

America’s future competitiveness and global technology leadership depend on access to radio spectrum – the lifeblood of these ubiquitous, data-hungry wireless devices.  That is why President Obama’s June 2010 Memorandum set a bold goal of nearly doubling the amount of spectrum available for commercial use by the end of this decade. NTIA is hard at work making that goal a reality. 

Internet Protocol (IP) numbers underpin and connect broadband and IP-based network infrastructures. Without IP numbers, we could not attach computers and smartphones to the Internet, and we could not route traffic to and from those devices. Without an adequate supply of these numbers, we could not design cloud computing networks or the smart grid. As we move to a world of innovation where virtually everything can be networked to everything else, we need to ensure a sufficient supply of IP numbers.

On the eve of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), we believe that it is the right time to reaffirm the U.S. Government’s commitment to the multistakeholder model as the appropriate process for addressing Internet policy and governance issues.  The multistakeholder model has enabled the Internet to flourish.  It has promoted freedom of expression, both online and off.  It has ensured the Internet is a robust, open platform for innovation, investment, economic growth and the creation of wealth throughout the world, including in developing countries.

There are those who may suggest next week in Dubai - and in future venues where Internet policy is discussed - that the United States controls the Internet. Alternatively, they may suggest that in the future governments alone should run the Internet.  Our response is grounded in the reality that this is simply not the case.  The Internet is a decentralized network of networks and there is no one party – government or industry – that controls the Internet today.  And that’s a good thing.

While stuck in construction traffic the other day, I thought of the old cliché that there are only two seasons – winter and road construction.  But after visiting the Central Valley Independent Network’s (CVIN) offices in Fresno, California this summer, I would add broadband construction as a third season.

For CVIN and all other Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) projects, summer is a time to build.  Whether it’s hanging fiber on utility poles or trenching, plowing, and drilling underground, our awardees and their construction crews are busy at work. 

Broadband is a world of extremes:  it takes heavy-duty, 10-ton equipment to install fiber strands that are as small as a human hair.  It takes months and years of hot, sweaty, dust-filled workdays to build a network that will provide massive amounts of data to end users at speeds measured in millionths of a second.  It takes hundreds of man-hours, at a pace of 1000 feet per day to install the fiber that will connect our schools and hospitals with resources on the other side of the planet with just the click of a mouse.