Resilient Tactical Edge Networks

SBIR · Phase: BOTH · Topic OSW27BZ02-DV005 · Solicitation 27.BZ

The realistic near-to-mid-term serviceable addressable market for private 5G in U.S. agriculture is the subset with real mobility, coverage, reliability, or data-volume pain: row-crop operations running GPS-guided and autonomous equipment, specialty-crop growers using machine vision and agricultural robotics, dairies and feedlots with dense livestock-monitoring deployments, irrigated operations with distributed pump and center-pivot control, and large ranches requiring wide-area coverage for animal and asset tracking. The scale of the opportunity is well documented. USDA Economic Research Service data show about 1.88 million farms in 2024 (roughly 39% of all U.S. land). Only 79% of farms reported internet access of any kind, leaving roughly one in five farms without even basic connectivity. There is also documented evidence that productivity of farms with connectivity is significantly higher than the ones without any connectivity. Furthermore, FCC data show that 39% of rural Americans lack access to minimum fixed broadband speeds, compared with 4% of urban Americans, and coverage on cropland and rangeland specifically is worse still. Public carrier networks will not close this gap on their own; carrier tower economics favor population density, and most agricultural land has almost none. This segment buys on measurable operational outcomes (machine uptime, yield per acre, input cost per acre, water use, herd health, labor hours saved), not on global platform standardization, and its stated barriers to adoption are consistent and compounding: ROI ambiguity, high capex against tight and cyclical farm margins, no in-house RF/cellular or IT staff, harsh outdoor operating environments, a fragmented device ecosystem spanning tractors, drones, sensors, and wearables, and coverage requirements measured in thousands of acres rather than thousands of square feet. A proprietary private 5G platform from a tier-one vendor addresses almost none of these barriers directly; it is priced and supported for industrial campuses and multi-site enterprise accounts, not a single farm with a handful of mission-critical connectivity problems to solve. An all-open-source stack removes the structural cost and lock-in that makes proprietary platforms a poor fit for this segment. Because OCUDU's O-CU/O-DU communicate with the rest of the network over open, standardized interfaces (especially the O-RAN 7.2x split to the O-RU), the network can be assembled from whichever RU vendor best fits a given operation's coverage geometry and budget, including high-power CBRS Category B radios and high-gain sector antennas mounted on existing farm infrastructure (grain legs, silos, center-pivot towers, farmstead masts) to maximize covered acres per radio. Together, OCUDU, SD-Core, SD-RAN, and OSC form one integrated, fully open-source 5G stack that a regional systems integrator, agricultural equipment dealer, rural wireless ISP, or electric/telephone cooperative can deploy, support, and price as a right-sized, as-a-service offer for a single operation, instead of selling a broad, vendor-locked platform. That directly answers this market's stated preference for outcome-first, economically flexible offers, and it supports a coexistence posture (private 5G for mobility, coverage, and uplink-intensive problems; existing farmstead Wi-Fi and LPWAN sensors where they already work) rather than a rip-and-replace sale. The trade-off of an all-open-source stack is that the burden of proving interoperability, stability, and security shifts from a single vendor's warranty to the integrator and the open-source community itself. Agricultural buyers, who by their own account lack in-house cellular and cybersecurity expertise, have little tolerance for integration failures discovered mid-season, when planting, spraying, irrigation, and harvest windows cannot be rescheduled. This is exactly the gap the on-going OCUDU Testing & Validation Plan, and its Radio Access Network (RAN) Testing…

SBIR/STTR 은 미국 중소기업만 지원할 수 있습니다(Small Business Act 법정 요건). • 계열사를 포함해 상시 종업원 500명 이하 • 미국 시민 또는 영주권자 1인 이상이 50%를 초과해 직접 소유·지배 • 미국 내 사업장을 두고 주로 미국 내에서 사업을 영위할 것 • 수행책임자(PI)의 주된 근무처가 신청 기업일 것 출처: https://www.sbir.gov/faq/eligibility-requirements

Primary country

🇺🇸 United States

Also eligible

None

Foreign companies

No

Local entity

Required

Location condition

미국 내 사업장을 두고 미국 시민·영주권자가 50%를 초과해 소유한 중소기업만 신청할 수 있습니다(법정 요건).

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Official URL

https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/

Application URL

https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/

Last fetched

2026.11.06

Human review

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First seen

2026.11.06

Data status

Auto-collected, not reviewed

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