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
November 26, 2025
The key to successful Open RAN deployments — the ability of subsystems from different vendors to seamlessly interoperate — is also the greatest challenge.
Commercial Tier 1 radio access networks (RANs) deployed today...
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...
Recent Publications
-
Jaden Pieper and Stephen D. Voran, “Unseen but not Unknown: Using Dataset Concealment to Robustly Evaluate Speech Quality Estimation Models,” Conference Paper, February 2026
We introduce Dataset Concealment (DSC), a rigorous new procedure for evaluating and interpreting objective speech quality estimation models. DSC quantifies and decomposes the performance gap between research results and real-world application requir...
-
Stephen D. Voran and Jaden Pieper, “Frequency-Domain Signal-to-Noise Ratios Illuminate the Effects of the Spectral Consistency Constraint and Griffin-Lim Algorithms,” Conference Paper, October 2025
The restoration of degraded audio signals is often performed on complex-valued frequency-domain (FD) representations. This requires manipulation of either magnitudes and phases or real and imaginary parts. In general, these manipulations do not prod...
This Month in ITS History
March 1976: ITS Connects to the ARPANET
In 1975, the Federal Telecommunications Standard Committee (FTSC) assigned Lead Agency responsibility to ITS for the development of Federal Standard 1033, “Criteria for Assessing the Performance of Telecommunication Systems Used to Support Federal Information Processing.” ITS interfaced its newly acquired host system to the ARPANET in March 1976 and immediately began performance parameter measurements on...