{"id":3452,"date":"2025-07-18T15:27:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T15:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/3452\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T15:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T15:27:08","slug":"wi-fi-experts-reveal-how-trumps-budget-bill-could-slow-down-your-wi-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/3452\/","title":{"rendered":"Wi-Fi Experts Reveal How Trump\u2019s Budget Bill Could Slow Down Your Wi-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"

You won\u2019t find the term \u201cWi-Fi\u201d anywhere in the text of President Donald Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill<\/a>, but a provision authorizing the FCC to auction off spectrum could seriously impact speeds on newer Wi-Fi routers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The latest generation of Wi-Fi 6E<\/a> and Wi-Fi 7<\/a> routers made massive speed improvements when the FCC opened up the 6GHz band<\/a> for Wi-Fi use in 2020. Now, the FCC could auction off up to half<\/a> of that same band to wireless companies, essentially trading Wi-Fi speeds for mobile.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Americans spend between 77% and 88% of their screen-on time connected to Wi-Fi, according to the mobile analytics company Opensignal<\/a>. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that we use Wi-Fi for the vast majority of our heavy lifting on the internet. So why does Trump\u2019s Big Beautiful Bill trade Wi-Fi speeds for mobile? Put simply, the government wants the money.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause spectrum auctions allow the government to get revenue without raising taxes, spectrum auctions frequently show up in budget bills,\u201d writes Harold Feld<\/a>, an analyst with the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. \u201cIn effect, this amounts to treating spectrum as a piggy bank rather than a vital national resource, which makes for lousy spectrum policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last spectrum auction generated $22 billion in revenue<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time the mobile industry has attempted to commandeer that valuable spectrum. When the FCC first opened up 6GHz<\/a> in 2020, then-FCC Chair Ajit Pai — who was appointed by Trump — wrote that keeping the band open to Wi-Fi \u201cpromotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum\u201d than using it for cellular networks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s primarily used by fixed wireless internet providers<\/a> in rural areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How will your Wi-Fi be affected?<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, one of the companies producing Wi-Fi 7-certified chipsets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s law of internet bandwidth<\/a> finds that a high-end internet user\u2019s connection speed grows by roughly 50% each year, doubling every 21 months — an observation that has held true since 1983.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As more and more people opt for gigabit internet<\/a> 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\u2019s like a highway going from two to four lanes — traffic can flow more easily without hitting jams.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other bands used by Wi-Fi routers, 2.4 and 5GHz<\/a>, 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\u2019t as many devices operating on that band.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c6GHz 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,\u201d Mark Walker, VP of technology policy at CableLabs, told CNET.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hitting that limit on the 6GHz band would mean different things for different applications, and it\u2019s most likely to happen during the \u201cinternet rush hour,\u201d or between 7 and 11 p.m..\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’s when you start to see latency and packet loss creep up,\u201d Walker said. \u201cFor something like email, that’s not super critical. If your email comes 2 seconds later, you don\u2019t even know. But if my voice comes 5 seconds later on a video call, the call is effectively over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why the mobile industry wants 6GHz<\/p>\n

Mobile carriers are always extremely thirsty for more spectrum, but it\u2019s unclear how much they really need 6GHz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no pressing need that I feel like we have to go out and acquire spectrum in the next 12, 24, even 36 months,\u201d AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said<\/a> at a conference just last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Similarly, Verizon Executive VP Sowmyanarayan Sampath said, \u201cWe have almost unlimited spectrum\u201d in May 2024<\/a>. T-Mobile also said last year that it\u2019s only used about 60%<\/a> of the spectrum it already has.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That said, a J.D. Power survey<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Desroches also noted that new spectrum could be used to boost AT&T\u2019s wireless home internet service, AT&T Internet Air. (I got paltry average download speeds of 5.86Mbps when I tested the service<\/a> last year.)<\/p>\n

AT&T cheered the spectrum news in the budget bill, writing in a statement<\/a> that it will help the company \u201cmeet soaring consumer demand and keep the US technologically competitive with other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fixed wireless providers could also be affected<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With less space available in these frequencies, service could be severely diminished.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless ISPs, sent a letter to the FCC<\/a> on Tuesday asking it to reconsider auctioning off CBRS spectrum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWISPA\u2019s 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,\u201d the letter says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s decisions will impact us one way or another.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You won\u2019t find the term \u201cWi-Fi\u201d anywhere in the text of President Donald Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[64,63,237,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-3452","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}