Federal government puts money behind NYU Tandon’s 5G cellular program

The federal government likes what’s going on at NYU Tandon, a $2.2 million grant to the university’s 5G wireless program would suggest.

The grant comes from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which announced earlier this week grants totaling $38.5 million to 33 universities and corporations to help research and design products that will aide emergency workers.

“These grant awards will help fulfill our mission, ensuring that first responders have access to advanced tools that can save lives,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in the announcement.

Researchers at NYU Tandon are working on a new generation of cell service that would utilize unused portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to deliver service that could be orders of magnitude faster than our current 4G service. In April, the school hosted a summit on 5G technology featuring talks from scientists at Nokia, Bell Labs, and the university (which we covered in some depth here).

According to a spokesman from NYU Tandon, the money from the grant will go toward work “exploiting frequencies above 6 gigahertz in the millimeter wave spectrum for emergency and safety applications: relaying video in moving ambulances, for example, or employing VR in emergencies, getting HD images from drones in real time, or controlling robots in dangerous environments.”