You won’t find the term “Wi-Fi” anywhere in the text of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, but a provision authorizing the FCC to auction off spectrum could seriously impact speeds on newer Wi-Fi routers.
Every wireless device, from garage door openers to baby monitors, relies on the electromagnetic spectrum to work. But that spectrum is a limited resource — to open up capacity for one technology, you have to take it away from another.
The latest generation of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers made massive speed improvements when the FCC opened up the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi use in 2020. Now, the FCC could auction off up to half of that same band to wireless companies, essentially trading Wi-Fi speeds for mobile.
Americans spend between 77% and 88% of their screen-on time connected to Wi-Fi, according to the mobile analytics company Opensignal. That’s also where the bulk of data-hungry tasks like uploading, downloading and online gaming occur. For every one bit carried on a mobile network, nearly 9 bits are carried on Wi-Fi.
It’s clear that we use Wi-Fi for the vast majority of our heavy lifting on the internet. So why does Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill trade Wi-Fi speeds for mobile? Put simply, the government wants the money.
“Because spectrum auctions allow the government to get revenue without raising taxes, spectrum auctions frequently show up in budget bills,” writes Harold Feld, an analyst with the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “In effect, this amounts to treating spectrum as a piggy bank rather than a vital national resource, which makes for lousy spectrum policy.”
The last spectrum auction generated $22 billion in revenue for the federal government in 2021-2022. This one is expected to raise $85 billion by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.
This isn’t the first time the mobile industry has attempted to commandeer that valuable spectrum. When the FCC first opened up 6GHz in 2020, then-FCC Chair Ajit Pai — who was appointed by Trump — wrote that keeping the band open to Wi-Fi “promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum” than using it for cellular networks.
In addition to the 6GHz band, the bill also lets the FCC auction off spectrum from Citizens Broadband Radio Service, a 150MHz slice between 3.55 and 3.7GHz that’s primarily used by fixed wireless internet providers in rural areas.
How will your Wi-Fi be affected?
The wireless industry is poised to take control of about half the 6GHz band, the valuable piece of electromagnetic spectrum that makes Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers so much faster than their predecessors. A laptop equipped with Wi-Fi 7 could reach “potential maximum” speeds of 5.8Gbps — 2.4 times faster than the 2.4Gbps possible with Wi-Fi 6/6E, according to Intel, one of the companies producing Wi-Fi 7-certified chipsets.
The median internet speed in the US currently sits around 288Mbps, which is roughly 20 times slower than 5.8Gbps. But like data consumption, the appetite for faster internet speed grows every year: Nielsen’s law of internet bandwidth finds that a high-end internet user’s connection speed grows by roughly 50% each year, doubling every 21 months — an observation that has held true since 1983.
As more and more people opt for gigabit internet speeds, the 6GHz band becomes even more essential. Wi-Fi 7 routers doubled the channel size of the 6GHz band, going from 160MHz to 320MHz. It’s like a highway going from two to four lanes — traffic can flow more easily without hitting jams.
A slew of new devices are equipped to take advantage of 6GHz, including the latest iPhones, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones, MacBooks, iPads, PlayStation 5 Pro, and Xbox Series X and S gaming consoles.
The other bands used by Wi-Fi routers, 2.4 and 5GHz, are so well-entrenched at this point in every house in America that it would be impossible to budge them out. But because 6GHz is relatively new, there aren’t as many devices operating on that band.
But 6GHz may be getting crowded with Wi-Fi devices sooner than we think. CableLabs, a nonprofit funded by cable industry companies, ran a simulation based on five years of growing Wi-Fi demand for 6GHz in a 144-unit building. It found that 6GHz will quickly approach exhaustion in high-density environments like this.
“6GHz seems like a lot of spectrum, but when you look at it in a scenario where there’s 144 Wi-Fi networks in a building with all these devices, it doesn’t quite go as far as you think,” Mark Walker, VP of technology policy at CableLabs, told CNET.
Hitting that limit on the 6GHz band would mean different things for different applications, and it’s most likely to happen during the “internet rush hour,” or between 7 and 11 p.m..
“That’s when you start to see latency and packet loss creep up,” Walker said. “For something like email, that’s not super critical. If your email comes 2 seconds later, you don’t even know. But if my voice comes 5 seconds later on a video call, the call is effectively over.”
Why the mobile industry wants 6GHz
Mobile carriers are always extremely thirsty for more spectrum, but it’s unclear how much they really need 6GHz.
“There is no pressing need that I feel like we have to go out and acquire spectrum in the next 12, 24, even 36 months,” AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said at a conference just last month.
Similarly, Verizon Executive VP Sowmyanarayan Sampath said, “We have almost unlimited spectrum” in May 2024. T-Mobile also said last year that it’s only used about 60% of the spectrum it already has.
That said, a J.D. Power survey from January found that demand for data is increasing among wireless customers, and with it, network problems — something that the 6GHz band would certainly help with.
Desroches also noted that new spectrum could be used to boost AT&T’s wireless home internet service, AT&T Internet Air. (I got paltry average download speeds of 5.86Mbps when I tested the service last year.)
AT&T cheered the spectrum news in the budget bill, writing in a statement that it will help the company “meet soaring consumer demand and keep the US technologically competitive with other countries.”
Fixed wireless providers could also be affected
I’ve focused mostly on the impact on Wi-Fi speeds, but fixed wireless internet providers in rural areas are also at risk of losing CBRS spectrum. It’s not just internet providers, either — more than 1,000 organizations use these airwaves, including hospitals, airports, sporting venues and universities, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
With less space available in these frequencies, service could be severely diminished.
The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless ISPs, sent a letter to the FCC on Tuesday asking it to reconsider auctioning off CBRS spectrum.
“WISPA’s members rely on the band to provide essential and reliable broadband services to hundreds of thousands of end users, many of whom live and work in rural communities, or other sparsely populated areas, where competitive choice is lacking,” the letter says.
There are a lot of ways the FCC can go with this spectrum auction, and there will certainly be plenty of lobbying by wireless carriers, Wi-Fi advocates and rural internet providers before the dust settles. But we all use these airwaves every day, and the FCC’s decisions will impact us one way or another.
