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. 

Screen capture with link to YouTube short introducing ITS

Graphic with link to Fiscal Year 2023 ITS Technical Progress Report

link to information about the Tale Mountain Field Site and Radio Quiet Zone

Graphic with link to ISART page

News

Bright Stars in the ITS Universe

July 1, 2026

In July, the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences celebrates two anniversaries: the entry of John Howard Dellinger into the Federal workforce and the publication of the open-source FORTRAN code for the Irregular Terrain Model (ITM).   ...

ITS Releases Broad Reference to Support Dynamic Spectrum Coexistence

June 15, 2026

Accurately predicting and modeling the impacts of terrain,...

Lessons Learned from ITS Open RAN System Integration: A Resource for Engineers, System Integrators, and Stakeholders Aiming to Deploy Open RAN Systems

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...

Recent Research Publications

  • Lucjan Janowski et al., “Fix Your Netflix Experiment,” Journal Article, June 2026

    This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. This paper examines the hypothesis that asking people about video quality changes t...

  • Jeffery A. Wepman et al., “Measured Out-of-Band Emissions in the 36–37 GHz Band from an n260 (37–40 GHz) Millimeter-Wave 5G Base Station,” Technical Report NTIA TR-26-582, June 2026

    Out-of-band emissions (OOBE) measurements in the 36–37 GHz band were performed on a commercially available outdoor 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) gNodeB operating in the n260 band (37–40 GHz). The 5G mmWave gNodeB is part of the Institute for Telecommu...

Ethel C. Marden and Robert D. Elbourn operating SEAC

This Month in ITS History

August 1912: Federal Regulation of U.S. Airwaves Begins

On August 13,1912, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912 (Public Law 264), the first federal regulation on all radio transmissions in the United States. Prompted by the Titanic disaster earlier in the year this bill mandated trained radio users to monitor distress signals for any passenger ship in American waters. The...

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