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Spectrum policy leaders from the Administration, private industry and federal government will participate in NTIA’s 2019 Spectrum Policy Symposium on Sept. 10 at the National Press Club. The program will provide updates on efforts to develop the National Spectrum Strategy as required by the Oct. 25, 2018 Presidential Memorandum on “Developing a Sustainable Spectrum Strategy for America’s Future.”

How can a smart city improve communities? At the recent Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) Expo, city officials across the country dug into this challenge. The three-day meeting welcomed shared stories about smart city projects that are helping communities improve agriculture and health care, reduce traffic congestion, increase energy efficiency, and speed emergency response times.

On Thursday, NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) released final test reports to commercial entities that participated in spectrum sharing testing on a model that would allow commercial and military use in the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band. The completed tests will drive progress toward initial commercial deployments in the band, prized for its excellent mix of capacity and coverage capabilities. With 4G LTE technology for the band available today, industry has already begun to develop specifications to support 5G deployments.

Today, NTIA filed a Petition for Rulemaking with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to update the rules governing Telecommunications Service Priority (TSP) so that it better reflects current technologies and industry practices.  NTIA filed the petition and a draft set of updated rules on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

NTIA’s engineering lab has shared Spectrum Access System (SAS) laboratory test reports with the commercial entities that participated in spectrum sharing testing at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences. The reports are a critical part of advancing the sharing model in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service 3.5 GHz band.

Charles Cooper, a seasoned executive and spectrum engineer with more than 25 years of broad federal and private sector experience, will become the new Associate Administrator of NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management on July 1. He joins the agency after six years at the Federal Communications Commission directing radio frequency enforcement activities.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has adopted NTIA software as the global standard to optimize radiofrequency (RF) spectrum sharing between air and ground systems across a broad range of frequencies. The software was released earlier this month and is available on NTIA's Github page.

The United States is among 42 countries to approve a new international agreement for building trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI), marking the first significant step in a global approach on this issue. Adherence to the agreement will foster innovation and trust in AI as it establishes principles for the responsible development and stewardship of AI, while ensuring respect for democratic values.

An innovative spectrum sharing model in the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band is coming closer to reality, NTIA senior spectrum advisor Derek Khlopin reported at the CBRS Alliance annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C. this week.

How can we get more use out of the radio spectrum? One way is by sharing radio bands between users who have never shared before. Consider radio frequencies near 3.5 GHz. Until recently, that part of the spectrum was used almost entirely by U.S. government radars, many of them on Navy aircraft carriers, enabling the same kind of air traffic control for the carriers as radars on land do at airports.

NTIA is hosting its fourth multistakeholder meeting April 11 on software component transparency to work on ways to enable a more secure software ecosystem. We’re excited to report that a great deal of progress has been made since the effort started eight months ago. The goal is to increase transparency around the use of third party software components so that when vulnerabilities are detected, there is a way to quickly remedy problems

Fighting opioid abuse is a major priority of the Trump Administration.

NTIA, on behalf of the First Responder Network Authority, is seeking a new board member for a seat that will become vacant in August, according to a Federal Register notice. The 15-member FirstNet board includes 12 non-permanent members, the Secretary of Homeland Security, U.S. Attorney General and Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Engineers at NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) have completed performance certification lab testing of Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) equipment – the sensors that will help enable dynamic sharing in the 3.5 GHz band between U.S. Navy radars and Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) devices.

As a critical step in delivering on President Trump’s call for development of a national spectrum strategy, NTIA has asked federal agencies to report their future spectrum needs over the next 15 years. The reports will help ensure the federal government is optimizing utilization of the nation’s spectrum resources and meeting the needs of spectrum users, including critical federal missions that serve the American public. Agencies must submit their initial reports by Feb. 21, 2019 and provide final reports by April 23, 2019.

Botnets and automated, distributed attacks threaten our nation’s Internet infrastructure. Solving this and other cybersecurity challenges is a top priority for the Trump Administration.

Behind every initiative to share spectrum are models of how radio waves in a particular band travel, or propagate, through different environments. How far will a signal travel before it becomes too faint to be useful or to interfere with another signal? What happens when a signal encounters a tree, or a hill, or a house? If we can accurately model how radio waves will behave, it can dramatically increase the odds that sharing mechanisms will work.

Exemplifying the power of partnerships, NTIA recently teamed up with the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Johnson C. Smith University to convene a broadband summit for HBCUs in North and South Carolina. On Nov.

As public safety agencies around the country take advantage of FirstNet, the first nationwide public safety broadband network (NPSBN), NTIA is marking the end of a grant program that helped lay the groundwork for FirstNet’s success.