Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsack
This Black History Month, NTIA celebrates the historic and present-day achievements of Black Americans who paved the way for innovation in telecommunications and tech sciences. We end the month with a spotlight on Dr. Jon Gant, Director of the Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives.
When did you become interested in digital inclusion?
The Governments of the United States, Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Sweden, and the United Kingdom concur on these shared principles for the research and development of 6G wireless communication systems; and recognize that by working together we can support open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, resilient, and secure connectivity. We believe this to be an indispensable contribution towards building a more inclusive, sustainable, secure, and peaceful future for all, and call upon other governments, organizations, and stakeholders
Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari’s chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns. A few years later, researchers from MIT were building a startup around the idea of using Wi-Fi signals to detect falls.
It’s easy to understand the growth in download bandwidth due to people streaming higher quality video and similar uses. Why do you think upload broadband usage is growing even faster? According to OpenVault, average upload usage has increased 290% since 2019, while average download usage has increased by 270%. There are some obvious reasons why upload bandwidth usage has been growing. There is now a substantial percentage of people who work from home.
During America's Gilded Age, a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs built the nation's railway system and in the process created huge piles of money by controlling shipping and travel lanes across the country. Today, as AI hype begins consuming everything in sight, some are hinting that mobile network operators—and their equipment vendors—may be sitting in a similar position thanks to the data they own. After all, AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on.
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