The Next Chapter for Wireless Spectrum

Building on a successful Internet investment strategy

We’ve spent lots of time over the last several years arguing on social media – and arguing about what to do about the psychedelic swirls of social media. We haven’t paid nearly as much attention to the miraculous Internet itself – the networks and digital infrastructure that deliver the data and make the modern economy go.

Despite numerous policy mistakes over the last three years, the Internet was a shining counter-example. Two trillion dollars of private capital invested in U.S. Internet infrastructure over the previous two decades made possible, for example, the phenomenon of remote work, including endless Zoom and Teams calls. Mobile network traffic in 2021, meanwhile, reached 53 exabytes, or 53 trillion megabytes.

Early this week the National Telecommunications and Information Administration accepted comments on the National Spectrum Strategy, the roadmap for the wireless airwaves. The agency which inventories the nation’s wireless spectrum resources is curious about what comes next. What policies might generate similar success over the next decade or two?

New technologies always present new opportunities and call for re-evaluation. Some are pushing more spectrum “sharing” and a move toward more unlicensed rather than licensed spectrum.

Our basic take on wireless spectrum, however, is to keep doing what works. Auctions of dedicated licensed spectrum over the past few decades, balanced with a few important unlicensed bands, have generated the world’s most advanced networks and most vibrant technology ecosystem, based on massive investment – in the spectrum itself and in the cell towers, base stations, fiber optic connections, and data centers that power the mobile world.

In 2021, U.S. mobile operators invested a record $35 billion in domestic wireless networks, bringing the total invested since 2015 to more than $200 billion. They’ve invested nearly as much in the spectrum itself.

In the past few years, the U.S. 5G strategy has unlocked several crucial blocks of spectrum in the “mid-band,” which are perfect for building denser nationwide wireless networks based on small cells. This included the all-time record C-band auction, which saw $81 billion in winning bids. The mid-band explosion, as we call it, will nearly double the amount of deployed commercial spectrum as of 2021.

But we can’t stop here. The Internet’s appetite for bandwidth is voracious. It tends to gobble up capacity with new applications and content as fast as we can deploy it. Huge chunks of spectrum remain in the hands of federal agencies, where they often go un- or under-used.

5G and 6G networks will have to more than deliver ever more rich and voluminous content to humans. They will also connect vehicles, machines, and billions of computers and sensors to each other. Many of these links will be mission critical and require extreme reliability.

One school of thought says that federal agencies can “share” spectrum and that radios might be agile enough to make unlicensed networks perform nearly as well as licensed ones. We should keep exploring these technologies, but they are unproven, and we should not make a wholesale change in strategy away from licensed. Some sharing and unlicensed efforts in the past few years have been real disappointments.

In addition to our existing needs, the truly explosive innovations coming out of the A.I. world will drive the need for far more capacious and reliable networks.

NTIA should be open to new ideas but should, with the Federal Communications Commission, accelerate efforts to pry open more airwaves for licensed commercialization.

---

Recent articles on wireless and Internet infrastructure…

• New data shows why U.S Internet shined during pandemic – AEIdeas – February 23, 2022

• The FAA’s embarrassing attempt to put 5G on ‘airplane mode’ – AEIdeas – December 21, 2021

• The Pentagon’s public Internet fantasy – AEIdeas – November 1, 2021

• Extending our many broadband victories – AEIdeas – August 27, 2021