Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / About ITS / ITS Mission & History

ITS: The Nation’s Spectrum and Communications Lab

Realizing the full potential of telecommunications to drive a new era of innovation, development, and productivity. 

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. 

What We Do

The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) is the research and engineering laboratory of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC). ITS manages the telecommunications technology research programs of NTIA and the Department of Commerce owned Table Mountain Radio Quiet Zone, working closely with other NTIA Line Offices to support Administration and Agency needs. ITS also addresses other federal agencies’ telecommunications and spectrum research needs via Interagency Agreements (IAAs) and engages directly with industry and academia via Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs).

ITS is both a scientific and an applied engineering laboratory. Theoretical and applied research are equally important facets of the ITS research mission that form a beneficial feedback loop. ITS’s fundamental research portfolio, funded by Congressional appropriation, provides new, expanded scientific and engineering understanding of the basic physical principles upon which spectrum use depends and of the complex technologies being developed to exploit the radio spectrum, including spectrum at progressively higher frequencies. This expertise is leveraged to quickly and effectively respond to telecommunications questions brought to ITS by other federal agencies as well as by NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management (OSM).

Technology transfer through open science and formal or informal collaborations ensures that the Nation receives maximum value from the theoretical and applied research in the Institute’s portfolio. ITS scientific advances in fundamental radio science and best practices for solving real-world problems are broadly disseminated through peer-reviewed publications. ITS researchers publish in peer reviewed scientific journals and participate in technical conferences to engage in lively exchange of ideas and widely disseminate ITS research results.

Software tools and validated propagation model implementations are released via the NTIA/ITS GitHub open-source code repository. Submissions to standards bodies further broaden the impact of ITS research.  ITS staff represent U.S. interests in many national and international telecommunication conferences and standards organizations. Through leadership roles in various working groups, ITS helps to drive innovation and contributes to the development of communications and broadband policies that enable a robust telecommunication infrastructure, ensure system integrity, support e-commerce, and protect an open global Internet.

ITS History

The Radio Section of the National Bureau of Standards was founded before World War I. Under the direction of Dr. J. H. Dellinger, the Radio Section contributed significantly to the understanding of radio propagation, and by 1939 it was releasing ionospheric radio wave propagation predictions one to three months in advance. During World War II, the Radio Section was re-organized into the Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL) to provide radio communication research for the armed services. IRPL served the war effort very successfully, and almost immediately it was recognized that there would be a peacetime need for continued, centralized radio propagation and standards research to support both military and civilian telecommunications.

In 1946, the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL) replaced the IRPL. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, CRPL made many important contributions, especially in developing ionospheric and tropospheric forward-scatter systems, which greatly expanded the range of frequencies available for communication beyond the horizon. By 1954, CRPL had outgrown its Washington D.C. facilities and was moved to the new DOC Boulder Laboratories building. The availability of the radio experimental field site at Table Mountain influenced the choice of Boulder CO for the new laboratory; the DOC leased the Table Mountain site in 1954 and purchased it in 1961.

A major reorganization of the DOC in 1965 led to CRPL being renamed the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences and Aeronomy (ITSA) and placed, with three other labs, under the newly formed Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA). In 1970, the policy-focused Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP) was formed in the Executive Office of the President and the Office of Telecommunications (OT) created in the DOC to support OTP, with the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) separated from aeronomy and put under OT. OT and OTP were reorganized into the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a DOC agency with ITS as its research laboratory, in fiscal year 1978. Since that time, ITS has performed telecommunications research and provided technical engineering support to NTIA and to other federal agencies, and after 1986 to private industry and academia, on a cost reimbursable basis.

ITS’s statutory authority to conduct research is codified in the NTIA Organization Act, Pub. L. No. 102-538, 106 Stat. 3533 (1992) (codified at 47 U.S.C. 901 et seq.).