Testing by NTIA’s ITS Paves the Way for First Responder Broadband Interoperability

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).

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, voice communications for first responders will migrate to LTE networks using Voice over LTE (VoLTE), a digital protocol under which the network handles voice as just another form of data. 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.