Spectrum Silos to Gigabit Wi-fi

The enormous and increasing
economic value of unlicensed spectrum for both personal and business productivity
is well-documented. In addition to generating more than $200 billion in value
for the U.S. economy each year, unlicensed spectrum serves as an incubator of
wireless innovation, including as the connective tissue of the emerging
Internet of Things. A single application – Wi-Fi – already carries between 60 and
80 percent of all mobile device data traffic, making wireless Internet access
far more available, fast and affordable for consumers.

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Unfortunately, there are
obstacles to extending and expanding the public interest benefits of Wi-Fi. One
challenge is that the unlicensed bands themselves are becoming congested,
particularly in cities and other densely populated areas where many users are sharing
spectrum in order to operate increasingly high-bandwidth applications like
video chat and streaming video. Although unlicensed bands are used very
efficiently – due to sharing and small-area re-use of spectrum – the FCC has
not increased access to unlicensed spectrum at the same pace as it has for licensed
services.

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A second related challenge
to the nation’s broadband goals is throughput capacity. With more and more users
demanding increasingly high-bandwidth and real-time applications, such as
high-definition video calling and streaming, the 20 megahertz wide channels that
characterize today’s Wi-Fi do not offer enough capacity to accommodate the
projected increases in demand for mobile data. Wider channels will be critical
to fuel very high-bandwidth apps and pervasive connectivity. This is particularly
true in the enterprise environment and in user-dense venues such as schools,
hotels, retail malls and sporting events.

As Wi-Fi transports an
increasing majority of the nation’s mushrooming mobile data traffic, Americans will
need both more unlicensed spectrum and the wider channels necessary to handle
higher-bandwidth applications and higher-density demand. Opening large
contiguous tracts of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for unlicensed sharing is key
to creating the “wider pipe” required for gigabit Wi-Fi networks.