Senate GOP Budget Bill Has Little-Noticed Provision That Could Hurt Your Wi-Fi

Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at New America’s Open Technology Institute, is quoted in an Ars Technica article about the updated text that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently published for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s portion of the budget reconciliation bill. The revisions remove language that would protect the 6 GHz band, which is crucial for the future of high-speed Wi-Fi, from being reallocated to wireless carriers through spectrum auctions.

Michael Calabrese of New America’s Open Technology Institute told Ars that 6 GHz and CBRS “are the most vulnerable non-federal bands for reallocation and auction.”

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Arguing that 6 GHz is crucial for Wi-Fi’s future, Calabrese said that “the bottleneck limiting home and business broadband capacity is no longer the Internet connection, but the quality of the Wi-Fi. Most Wi-Fi still relies on a much smaller amount of unlicensed spectrum at 2.4 and 5 GHz, which limits throughput to about 400Mbps and connects fewer devices to the same access point.”

The Wi-Fi 6E standard adds support for 6 GHz spectrum, and the in-development Wi-Fi 7 will take full advantage of the band, Calabrese said. “By leveraging access to the entire 6 GHz band, Wi-Fi 7 can nearly double speeds, support hundreds of devices in a location, prioritize lag-sensitive applications like real-time video, and support emerging future apps such as virtual reality and telepresence that will be used almost entirely indoors,” he said.