Telecompetitor recently published an article that cited concerns from analysts at MoffettNathanson Research that wonder about the way spectrum is being allocated for FWA home cellular broadband. It turns out that the big cellular carriers are devoting a huge amount of network resources to FWA while reaping only small financial benefits. FWA use may already account for more than half of the traffic on the Verizon cellular network while only accounting for 3% of Verizon’s revenues. FWA makes up only 6% of T-Mobile’s revenues.

I’ve written about this before, and the difference in monthly data usage between cell customers and home broadband customers is immense. CTIA, the association for cellular carriers, recently reported that the average cell customer uses 17.2 gigabytes of data per month on cellular networks. OpenVault recently reported that the average home broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes per month at the end of the third quarter. That means that the average FWA customer is using as much bandwidth as 37 average cellular customers.

You might ask why it matters how Verizon and T-Mobile use the spectrum they purchased in FCC auctions. From a regulatory perspective, it probably doesn’t matter. Once these companies buy the spectrum, they are free to use it in ways allowed by the spectrum licenses. Cellular spectrum has been used for home broadband for many years through the sale of hotspots. The big difference between hotspots and FWA is that hotspots most normally have stingy data caps similar to what is sold to cellphones, while FWA offers unlimited home broadband.

But from a market perspective, it matters a lot because the government has suddenly decided to shuttle a lot more spectrum to the cellular carriers. In the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress instructed the FCC to find at least 800 megahertz of spectrum for commercial wireless services. The expectation is that the sale of this spectrum could raise around $88 billion for the U.S. Treasury. It’s highly likely that the three big cellular companies would buy most of this spectrum along with perhaps a few large cable companies.

Cellular carriers need this extra spectrum to support FWA. Even if they add no new FWA customers, home broadband usage has been growing at around 9% per year, so FWA will take up an increasing share of existing cellular spectrum every year. But the major reason the carriers need more spectrum is because they have big plans to continue to grow FWA cellular. Verizon says it plans to double the number of FWA customers by 2028. T-Mobile says it plans to grow from today’s 7.8 million FWA customers to over 12 million by 2028. AT&T has expressed no specific plan for FWA growth but has recently stepped up sales significantly.

The three carriers will need the new spectrum being made available by Congress to support their sudden appetite for using spectrum to compete for home broadband. That’s one of the more surprising sentences I have ever written. A decade ago, I would have been laughed out of the room if I had suggested that our scarce national spectrum resource should be used to compete with landline broadband networks.

This is policy gone amok. Clearly, the carrier lobbyists were successful in getting this change inserted into the Big Beautiful Bill. That alone is extraordinary, because in the past, the FCC and the NTIA together collaborated to determine spectrum policy. Apparently, Congress can now set spectrum policy in a footnote of a budget reconciliation bill.

There are many other important uses for the same spectrum bands now being considered for expanding FWA. The spectrum is also needed for the military, for rural fixed wireless broadband, for communicating with airplanes, for weather services, for public safety, and for WiFi.

That last use is the most troublesome of all. WiFi spectrum is by far the most valuable spectrum in the U.S. economy. Almost everybody reading this blog spends most of their online time, whether by computer or cellphone, using WiFi spectrum. The FCC is likely going to have to dip into the 6 GHz WiFi spectrum to satisfy the Congressional mandate. That is absurdly short-sighted and undoes decades of careful spectrum deliberations that have tried to make sure that every use of spectrum is protected.

It’s a fair question to ask if we even have a national spectrum policy now. Raiding 800 megahertz of the most valuable spectrum we have to support FWA sounds less like a policy and more like a land grab by the cellular industry.