As we dive into a new year, new administration and new Congress, one thing remains the same: we will need more spectrum to power our increasingly data-centric lives. Almost everything we do today is online — from working, learning, accessing health care and buying groceries to streaming content. Our everyday activities rely on the exchange or consumption of data. As discussed in our prior blog, “The Case for Additional Unlicensed Spectrum,” we see that case only growing stronger every day.

Traditionally, policymakers, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), focused spectrum decisions around coverage, to make sure that consumers across the United States could access communications and the internet. Now that almost all of the country is covered by communications and internet services, we need to shift our priorities to focus on meeting consumers’ and the industry’s capacity and performance needs. A helpful starting point is to look at how people and businesses are consuming data now and where technology is driving more demand.

The workhorse of connectivity, Wi-Fi carries more than 90 percent of all consumer internet traffic. Looking at just mobile devices and the nation’s largest wireless providers, Open Signal found that for every one bit carried on a mobile network, nearly 9 bits are carried on Wi-Fi. Wireless providers and their networks fundamentally rely on Wi-Fi to manage their capacity and traffic because the majority of smartphone usage occurs at home, where they are predominantly connected to Wi-Fi. The overwhelming reliance on Wi-Fi is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

The Economic Impact of Surging Wi-Fi Demand

Unsurprisingly, given the heavy consumer reliance on Wi-Fi, another recent study found that the annual U.S. economic value of Wi-Fi is expected to grow from $1.6 trillion in 2024 to $2.4 trillion by 2027, including an estimated $514 billion in consumer benefit, $624 billion in producer surplus and $1.29 billion in GDP contribution. The same study found that the FCC’s April 2020 decision to open additional unlicensed spectrum to support Wi-Fi growth (in the 6 GHz spectrum band) generated $870 billion in economic value, just from 2023-2024, and that number is expected to increase to $1.2 trillion by 2027.

The annual CES in Las Vegas always provides a preview of our increasingly connected world — from wider adoption of health care applications to richer and more immersive entertainment to new smart home applications. One primary enabler for all these applications is the ubiquitous, plentiful and inexpensive wireless connectivity provided through Wi-Fi.

Not only will these innovations add more devices and applications to the already significant load on Wi-Fi frequencies, but they will also be increasingly data intensive. The new devices and applications will increasingly require higher speeds and lower latencies to work. A recent ABI Research report projects that current-standard (6 GHz-supported) Wi-Fi devices will grow from 95 million in 2024 to 367 million in 2029 — an increase of 288 percent in just five years — in North America alone.

That’s why the Wi-Fi industry has already developed a new Wi-Fi standard that will use wider-bandwidth channels to support these types of applications and more efficiently use available unlicensed spectrum. The catch is that they need more contiguous unlicensed spectrum bands to make enough wide channels to keep pace with consumer needs and technology advances.

How We Can Evolve With Growing Demands

Without more unlicensed spectrum, Wi-Fi performance will degrade as more devices, applications and users come online. Diminished performance is expected first in areas like dense commercial and residential areas, such as universities, apartments and office buildings that host high concentrations of users and devices. As the number of devices grows and more data-intense applications become widely adopted, Wi-Fi demand will continue to grow across the country.

The expected Wi-Fi spectrum exhaustion in densely populated environments creates a problem, as roughly a third of Americans live in apartments, condos, connected townhomes or other multi-family buildings, and even more people work in office buildings with more than one tenant. Wi-Fi exhaust could start to appear within a small space, or even a block, where multiple Wi-Fi networks are operating. These networks could be supporting multiple devices per household or office and multiple users, all sharing the same unlicensed frequencies.

Initially, degraded Wi-Fi performance will occur at peak usage times. As more devices, users and more data-intensive applications — such as telemedicine and augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) — start to compete for the same channels, that degraded performance will extend for more time and more broadly to more locations.

More unlicensed spectrum is the key to averting this looming problem.

Fortunately, policymakers already have a successful model to follow — the FCC’s 2020 decision to make the U.S. the first country in the world to open the 6 GHz band to unlicensed commercial use by sharing with incumbent licensees, including public safety, utility and broadcast links. Other governments around the world are following the United States’ leadership, given the significant economic and technological success.

Thanks to the U.S.’s leadership and forward-thinking, American consumers are the first to experience better, faster and more reliable Wi-Fi service almost everywhere they go. But technology will not stop advancing, and consumers will only expect better connectivity. Given the astounding growth and demand for Wi-Fi, the U.S. must again lead the way to create room for continued unlicensed innovation, establish a foothold in the Wi-Fi and unlicensed global technology markets, and model how other allied countries can create economic value, expansive access and innovation.

Below, we outline some of the technical considerations as we look more closely at the looming Wi-Fi spectrum exhaustion issue.

Unlicensed Spectrum Efficiencies Across Dimensions of Frequency, Time and Geography

Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies are highly efficient stewards of limited spectrum, designed to maximize the utility of every MHz of available spectrum. This enables unlicensed technologies to support a wide variety and intensity of devices, applications and use cases. Wi-Fi’s efficient use of spectrum is built on low-power use — minimizing (but not eliminating) geographic overlap of uncoordinated networks, equitable time-sharing through “listen before talk” or similar contention-management techniques, and the support for the full channelization of all available unlicensed frequencies.

• Geography: Most notably, the FCC’s 6GHz rules constrain the transmission powers of both access points and clients, limiting the coverage area of these Wi-Fi networks, therefore reducing the number of geographically overlapping networks in an area.
• Time: Wi-Fi and other similar unlicensed technologies incorporate contention-management techniques that enable geographically overlapping Wi-Fi networks to use the same (or partially overlapping) frequencies. Networks then equitably share those frequencies in time between the two or more overlapping networks.

Figure 1: In general, when there are physically overlapping Wi-Fi networks on the same channel, only one network can access that channel at a time.

• Frequency: The 6 GHz band provides seven non-overlapping 160 MHz channels or three nonoverlapping 320 MHz channels. This has enabled geographically overlapping networks, like those in neighboring apartments, to reduce but not eliminate frequency overlap increasing available capacity to each Wi-Fi network.

Figure 2: Current Wi-Fi channelization of the 6 GHz band and potential future Wi-Fi channelization of the 7/8 GHz band. (Click image to enlarge.)

Through the dimensions of geography, time and frequency, Wi-Fi provides an incredible amount of data-carrying capacity, but it isn’t inexhaustible.

As we look to the future, these techniques, as well as further advances in Wi-Fi technology, are unlikely to meet growing demand from the devices and applications that rely on Wi-Fi — without additional unlicensed spectrum.

With additional unlicensed spectrum, however, Wi-Fi would have access to additional channels, further reducing conflict and performance degradation in networks that are close to each other and increase the instantaneous bandwidth and throughput available to applications. This would further reduce the likelihood of collisions in time.

Growing Demands Will Strain Available Unlicensed Spectrum

The explosion in the number of connected devices and the increased throughput, latency and performance demands of existing and new applications will exceed the available and future Wi-Fi capacity from currently available spectrum. As ABI Research explains, by the end of the decade, most households will have 6 GHz-capable Wi-Fi 7 access points, and we’ll begin to see the transition to Wi-Fi 8 access points.

• Total Number of Connected Devices: In 2024, the average household had 18 connected devices, but as more devices add Wi-Fi connections, such as appliances and lightbulbs, we regularly see households with 40, 50, 75 or more. ABI Research forecasts that the number of connected devices will continue to grow, with total annual shipments of Wi-Fi-connected devices to North America growing by 35.1 percent each year from 2023 through 2029. Although many of these devices are relatively low bandwidth (e.g., thermostats, lighting controls, appliances), each regularly transmits and receives data, increasing the probability of crowding and contention with other devices on the network. As the number of total connected devices increases, the amount of unused unlicensed spectrum in a home or business decreases. This will most negatively affect latency-sensitive applications, such as video conferencing and immersive, online gaming, which require ready access to uncongested spectrum.
• More Demanding Applications and Devices: The ceaseless march toward higher picture quality and the growing incorporation of AI capabilities will drive increased Wi-Fi traffic in the coming years. For instance, we see all the major streaming platforms moving toward some version of 4K Ultra HD, high dynamic range (HDR) formats (e.g., Dolby Vision and HDR10+). In parallel, smart television manufacturers are rapidly producing devices that support these more data-intensive formats. These new formats and future formats and associated devices will continue to drive and require increased bitrates. For instance, streaming a Dolby Vision video to a smart TV can easily have a bit rate of 25–30 Mbps. We expect even higher bitrates for video formats being streamed to AR/VR goggles as higher resolution and picture quality are key to these experiences. Moreover, we expect the widespread adoption of AI capabilities by device manufacturers and consumers to further drive Wi-Fi traffic, including from increased upstream video and telemetry data for AI processing in the cloud, and increased frequency and size of software updates to support locally deployed AI models.
• New Client-to-Client Connections: To further enhance the utility of 6 GHz, the FCC recently enabled very low power (VLP) unlicensed devices to use the band. With much lower power levels, VLP connections are very short range. The primary use cases for VLP include wearables, such as watches, rings and earbuds, and other short-range use cases such as connectivity between AR/VR goggles and a TV or between a gaming controller and console. What sets many of these connections apart is that the same bit will make multiple wireless hops in the home before it reaches the Wi-Fi access point and the broader internet, driving substantially more demand for unlicensed spectrum capacity.

We anticipate that the growth and increasingly intense and demanding use of Wi-Fi will first lead to unlicensed spectrum exhaust and degraded performance in the most dense environments, like apartments, condos, schools, and office buildings, before manifesting in less dense environments.

Open Additional Unlicensed Spectrum!

To enable the connection-rich near future for all end users, the U.S. government (and governments around the world) must identify additional unlicensed spectrum. Today’s growing number of Wi-Fi devices, and the next generation of devices, that support applications in education, health care and entertainment all fundamentally rely on ubiquitous, plentiful and inexpensive wireless connectivity that Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies provide.

Without additional unlicensed spectrum, the flow of transformative technology and applications will begin to slow down. CableLabs looks forward to continuing to work with policymakers and the broader industry to help open additional unlicensed spectrum.