Secure, reliable, high-speed wireless communications are critical to the economic and national competitiveness of the United States. Advanced communications are enabling dramatic changes in how consumers, manufacturers, governments, and others provide and consume information, transact business, provide and use essential services, and shop, among other tasks. An analysis by Accenture predicts that by 2022 there will be approximately 29 billion connected devices globally, 500 million of which will be connected to 5G wireless networks. This insatiable societal demand for connectivity will require significant advancements in communication technologies. Accenture forecasts that over the next several years, wireless providers will invest approximately $275 billion in U.S. infrastructure, creating up to three million new jobs and boosting annual GDP by $500 billion.
NIST is currently the U.S. government’s leader in fundamental and applied research, standards and government-academia-industry coordination for advanced communications technologies.
Learn more about NIST’s work in advanced communications and NIST leadership in three spaces:
Fifth generation (or 5G) wireless communications systems, expected to roll out later this year, include a wide range of new technologies, many of which will be much faster and carry far more data than today’s technologies.
As the nation’s measurement authority, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is helping to create the technologies and methods that industry can use to build and evaluate 5G systems.