RAPID Program Awards Over $50 Million to Eleven Teams

The National Spectrum Consortium and FutureG Office announced eleven awards for integrated sensing and communications technology development.

Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Telecommunications

Isometric editorial illustration of a bare parabolic antenna dish beside rectangular waveguide ducts, with signal arcs passing to a second dish across a flat field, suggesting integrated sensing and wireless communication hardware. — The National Spectrum Consortium and FutureG Office awarded eleven teams more than $50 million under the RAPID program, including AT&T, Nokia Federal, and Leidos, to develop integrated sensing and communications technology. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

The National Spectrum Consortium and the FutureG Office announced eleven awards totaling more than $50 million under the RAPID program, which develops integrated sensing and communications technologies. Recipients include AT&T, Nokia Federal, Leidos, and Parallel Wireless, working with universities and subcontractors.

Why it matters

The awards fund research into combining radar-style sensing with wireless communications, a capability relevant to future spectrum-sharing and defense networks. The program is run jointly with the FutureG Office in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, linking commercial telecom firms with federal technology priorities.

The eleven RAPID awards total more than $50 million and fund work on integrated sensing and communications hardware and software. The extraction does not provide individual award values or delivery schedules.

The players

National Spectrum Consortium

A U.S. defense-focused consortium that manages federal spectrum and wireless research programs with industry and academic members.

AT&T

A major U.S. telecommunications carrier that received a RAPID award in partnership with Ericsson.

Nokia Federal

The U.S. government-focused arm of Finnish telecommunications equipment maker Nokia, which led a RAPID award team.

The details

Awards went to companies and their subcontractors, several of them paired with universities, including Abside Networks with Northeastern University and George Mason University with Michigan State University. Altio Labs, North Carolina State University, and Nokia Federal each led teams spanning multiple institutions.

November 5, 2026: Eleven RAPID awards announced.

The Tech Race

The RAPID awards are run through the FutureG Office, the Pentagon research body that has steered federal investment in next-generation wireless. The eleven awards extend that effort into combined sensing and communications, a line of work that competes with commercial 6G research.

The research could eventually shape how future wireless networks handle radar-like sensing alongside data traffic. The extraction gives no timeline for commercial products, so consumer effects remain years away.

The takeaway

Federal funding for combined sensing and communications signals where defense and commercial wireless research are converging. Watch for follow-on milestones from the awarded teams to see whether the technology moves toward deployment.