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Obama Pledges More Than $400 Million for 5G Research



The feds will tackle 5G challenges and collaborate with private companies.

By Tom Brant
July 15, 2016 05:18pm EST

The Obama administration today pledged [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/15/fact-sheet-administration-announces-advanced-wireless-research (blurbed and linked in the post to which this is a reply)] to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade on research to develop technology for 5G [ http://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what-is-5g ] mobile networks.

The bulk of the funds will come from the National Science Foundation, which will begin building four "city-scale advanced wireless testing platforms" in 2017. The cities will be chosen via competition, and each winner will get city-wide radio antennas that will allow public and private researchers to test 5G technologies in a real-world setting. NSF plans to spend $50 million on the program over the next five years.

The agency also committed more than $350 million to fund prizes, workshops, and international collaborations to test and develop networks, devices, and protocols for the Internet of Things. They include everything from a challenge to restore critical communications in the aftermath of a natural disaster to a workshop focused on reducing latency, or the time it takes for data to arrive after a device requests it.

Ultra-low latency networks are required for emergency response and self-driving cars. With today's announcement, the NSF will join many companies, from T-Mobile [ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2499872,00.asp ] to Intel [ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2499704,00.asp ], which are already studying ways to reduce latency in 5G networks.

Other federal agencies committing themselves to 5G research as part of today's announcement include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which plans to use 5G test platforms in the new Spectrum Challenge [ http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-03-23 ] component of its decade-old competition [ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1866514,00.asp ] for teams building robotic vehicles.

Multiple tech companies, including HTC, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm, and AT&T, also pledged their support for the government's research projects. The firms are already working on their own 5G efforts, and will offer financial support as well as engineering equipment and guidance.

The announcement comes one day after the FCC voted [ http://www.pcmag.com/news/346116/fcc-vote-kicks-off-race-to-5g , (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=123871550 (and any future following)] to dedicate vast amounts of high-frequency spectrum for 5G. Federal agencies currently use some of that spectrum for their own communications, and Obama pledged to share 500 MHz of that spectrum by 2020.

© 2016 Ziff Davis, LLC. PCMag Digital Group

http://www.pcmag.com/news/346166/obama-pledges-more-than-400-million-for-5g-research [with comments]