Starting in 2021, the National Spectrum Consortium (NSC) launched working groups that serve as a collaborative platform between industry, academia, and government, to leverage expertise to inform national policy and commercial standards. The three working groups focus on spectrum superiority, 5G, and regulations, and will establish best practices and publish research related to standards in telecommunication, which is a focus area for the Department of Defense. These collaborative working groups will help both the military and commercial industry use 5G and other spectrum technologies.
Additionally, NSC established the Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions (PATHSS) Task Group to provide a forum for industry and the DoD to exchange sensitive and classified information on current and projected military and commercial requirements in the mid-band spectrum. The group would allow industry to gain insight into the government’s needs, while the DoD learns proprietary or technical details from industry in an effort to enable spectrum sharing.
These efforts demonstrate the NSC’s commitment to using collaborative platforms to build bridges between government and industry to achieve breakthroughs in spectrum- and spectrum-dependent outcomes, and provide policy and regulatory insights to enhance, inform, and sustain U.S. technical leadership.
About the National Spectrum Consortium
The National Spectrum Consortium members develop prototypes via an easy-to-use, highly flexible, $2.5 billion contracting instrument known as the Spectrum Forward Other Transaction Agreement (OTA). The OTA focuses on technology areas that enable spectrum sharing and maneuver, and that leverage expanded spectrum access to advance future generations (5G/xG) of wireless communications architectures and capabilities. Its scope includes exploitation of the massive amounts of data traversing through spectrum, enabling the Internet of Things (IoT), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), big data and data analytics, and more — all within zero trust environments.
