NYU Wireless, founded by Ted Rappaport, may be the World's most respected research site In wireless. Tom Marzetta, whose Massive MIMO may be the most important advance in wireless this century, joined from Bell Labs. There are a dozen senior researchers and a slew of grad students and postdocs.
Ted, the Prince of Millimeter Wave, was the first in the US to believe mmWave would work for 5G mobile. His teams took mmWave gear to really tough terrain, the buildings of Manhattan. Their results astounded the industry. A year later, everyone in wireless was investigating mmWave.
Marzetta and Rappaport now are doing leading research on "terahertz" for 6G. (Mostly actually a few hundred GHz,) We need that kind of work from academia, ten and twenty years ahead of what's being deployed.
A slew of other academics will share the facility. Federal funding for broadband deployment research has mostly gone to people who've contributed little of substance. I'm glad to see NSF is more selective.
From Ted: