ITS: The Nation’s Spectrum and Communications Lab
Our mission is to ADVANCE innovation in communications technologies, INFORM spectrum and communications policy for the benefit of all stakeholders, and INVESTIGATE our Nation’s most pressing telecommunications challenges through research that employees are proud to deliver.
News
February 25, 2025
Adam Hicks (l.) and Robert Achatz (r.) prepare to leave for McMurdo Station. (Photo credit: USAP)
In December 2024, ITS electronics engineers Robert Achatz and Adam Hicks travelled from ITS’s Boulder laboratory...
January 6, 2025
To make the most efficient use of available bandwidth, how much can speech and video be compressed before the end user perceives them as degraded? ITS’s Audio Quality...
October 17, 2024
The inaugural International Open RAN Symposium (IORS) convened September 17–19, 2024, in Golden, Colorado, United States of America. NTIA welcomed over 250 participants at the inaugural Symposium from over 20 countries.
From plenary sessions,...
Recent Publications
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Robert J. Achatz, Adam C. Hicks, Sarah L. Vasel, and Ryan S. McCullough, “2024 McMurdo Area Radio Noise Measurements and Analysis,” Technical Report NTIA TR 25-579, September 2025
The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) performed high frequency (HF) band (3-30 MHz) radio noise power measurements at six locations in the McMurdo Station (MS), Antarctica (AQ), area and one location at the Black Island Telecommunicatio...
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Margaret H. Pinson et al., “Test Plans, Results, and Lessons Learned About Open RAN Integration During the NTIA 5G Challenges,” Special Publication NTIA SP-25-578, April 2025
The vision of the 5G Challenge competitions was to accelerate adoption of 5G open interfaces, interoperable subsystems, and multi-vendor solutions by fostering a large, vibrant, and growing vendor community dedicated to advancing 5G interoperability...
This Month in ITS History
October 1997: First VQEG Meeting
On October 14, 1997 the Video Quality Exerts Group (VQEG) held its first meeting, hosted by the telecommunication laboratory CSELT in Turin, Italy. VQEG was created by members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to focus on the complex and multi-disciplinary field of video quality. Video had become increasingly important as a form of telecommunications, and it was clear that compression of digital vid...