RE:MeanwhileWith all of the promo on "Spectrum" as in Spectrum Slicing over the past 2+ years it is too bad they could not get into that other spectrum mode that has taken over the industry i.e. spectrum sharing. It seems to have taken the industry by storm while spectrum slicing does not appear to even get a toe hold. Spectrum Consortium, Spectrum Forward OTA, and Spectrum Collaboration but none of it gives consideration to Spectrum Slicing.
The $6.2 million contract is part of a larger, five-year transaction agreement between DoD and the National Spectrum Consortium worth up to $2.5 billion. That vehicle, the Spectrum Forward Other Transaction Agreement (OTA), is aimed at making it simpler for DoD to work with the approximately 400 U.S. tech and industrial companies who are part of the NSC, which can respond to DoD requests for rapid prototypes and technology development centered around the use of spectrum. DoD has already issued a number of such requests, of which one was focused on spectrum-sharing capabilities. The Defense Department last October awarded $600 million in contracts related to 5G testing and development at five locations, with AT&T, Nokia, Federated Wireless and Ericsson among the recipients.
The specific areas of focus for the Spectrum Forward OTA include 5G; cognitive spectrum sharing; virtual, augmented and mixed reality; narrow-band IoT; autonomous navigation, next generation radio access networks and machine learning, among others.
DoD’s interest in 5G has also extended to the possibility of private 5G networks and the use of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS); in 2019, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s three-year Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which explored the efficacy of using artificial intelligence-powered software-defined radios to enable ad hoc dynamic spectrum sharing, culminated in a final event held at Mobile World Congress in Los Angeles.