National Telecommunications and Information Administration

The recently enacted Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 provides new sources of tribal broadband funding to assist in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic which is exacerbating the digital divide across Indian Country.  With the designated funding, NTIA is in the process of developing the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP) that will make grants available to eligible entities as quickly as possible.

In accordance with the Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020, the Executive Branch has developed a comprehensive implementation plan associated with the National Strategy to Secure 5G.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, under sponsorship of and in collaboration with the Department of Defense 5G Initiative, is seeking comments and recommendations from all interested stakeholders to explore the creation of a 5G Challenge that would accelerate the development of the open 5G stack ecosystem in support of Department of Defense missions. These comments will help NTIA and the U.S. Government identify and mitigate the challenges in creating and executing a competition.

State governments around the country responded quickly to the strain on broadband networks during the COVID pandemic. They ramped up their creative problem-solving and increased their coordination with other states and the federal government.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Minority Broadband Initiative (MBI), in partnership with the United States Distance Learning Association and the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education, recently held a teleconference(link is external) to brief Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) on new Department of Education distan

Telemedicine and telehealth-related activities are on the rise, according to NTIA’s November 2019 Internet Use Survey, which found that more households are using the Internet to communicate with health professionals, access health records, and research health information. The proportion of households that accessed health or health insurance records online grew from 30 percent in 2017 to 34 percent in 2019.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS), the nation’s spectrum and communications lab, released a new official code base for the Irregular Terrain Model (ITM) for use by experts and non-experts alike. ITM is the fifth propagation model code base that ITS has released on GitHub. In addition to the C++ propagation model source code, ITS published packages that target the .NET development environment. ITS also code signs its propagation software.