Capterra Glossary
Basic Trading Area (BTA)
A BTA is a geographical area used to determine where a personal communications service can operate. The Rand McNally 1992 Commercial Atlas and Marketing Guide coined the term. The FCC uses BTAs to issue 800MHz licenses to mobile service providers in:
United States
Puerto Rico
Guam
American Samoa
Northern Mariana Islands
U.S. Virgin Islands
Each metropolitan trading area (MTA) comprises several BTAs. For example, Minneapolis—St. Paul. As of 2021, there are 487 BTAs in the U.S., according to the FCC.
What Small and Midsize Businesses Need to Know About Basic Trading Area (BTA)
SMBs that specialize in broadband or mobile services have to adhere to BTA and MTA rules when filing for communications licenses, such as where a Personal Communications Service can operate.
Related Terms
- Synchronous
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Intranet
- Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR)
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Managed Service Provider (MSP)
- Haptics
- WAN (Wide-Area Network)
- Service-oriented Architecture (SOA)
- Augmented Reality (AR)
- Chief Information Officer (CIO)
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Service-Level Agreement (SLA)
- Scalability
- Data Center
- Authorization
- Multitenancy