There is something that has been nagging at the back of my mind for the last year. In the One Big Beautiful Bill, Congress ordered the FCC to auction 800 MHz of midrange spectrum. This is spectrum that is expected to mostly go to cellular carriers, although at least some will go to others. Since Congress’s stated goal is to raise $85 billion for the U.S Treasury with these auctions, it’s not likely that this spectrum will be priced low enough to be attractive to many users other than large cellular companies, and perhaps large cable companies and satellite companies.

The question that has been nagging me is whether the cellular industry really needs that much new spectrum. I acknowledge there is growth in cellphone data usage, but it is not growing at a rate that justifies the need for this much additional spectrum.

Instead, the new spectrum is needed to support FWA home broadband. At the end of 2025, OpenVault says the average home and small business broadband customer uses an average of 767 gigabytes of data per month. By contrast, the average cellular customer uses perhaps 25 gigabytes per month on the cellular network (most cellphone usage is on WiFi). This means that one FWA home broadband customer uses as much cellular network bandwidth resources as 31 cellphone customers. That may not sound significant, but consider that by the end of the first quarter of this year that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon had collectively added 15.5 million customers to FWA, and have been steadily adding around 1 million more FWA customers every quarter.

All three carriers have plans to continue to add FWA customers. Verizon says its goal by 2030 is 8-9 million FWA customers, and T-Mobile’s goal is 15 million. AT&T hasn’t stated a goal, but it clearly is growing.

If we go back just ten years, there was absolutely zero conversation in the industry about using cellular spectrum to create a major broadband competitor. There was no discussion at any proceeding at the FCC of the need to enable new broadband competition using cellular spectrum. The cellular carriers have offered cellular broadband for many years through the use of hotspots, but hotspot plans were generally capped at a tiny levels of monthly usage, which differs significantly from FWA, which offers unlimited broadband.

The question that has been nagging me is whether FWA is really the right priority use of spectrum. Spectrum is not an unlimited resource. Cities all have cable company broadband, and an increasing percentage of competition with fiber. The federal government just spent billions on grants to get better broadband to rural areas. At the same time, Starlink has demonstrated that satellites can provide at least one broadband option to almost every rural location.

I’m not saying that the competition brought about by FWA isn’t beneficial, because it is. The FWA industry is probably the biggest reason why cable companies have stopped their annual rate increases and are now offering lower-cost packages.

My nagging concern is that a decade from now, we’ll find there isn’t enough spectrum available for the many other uses of wireless technology. I keep wondering how we found ourselves supporting FWA through the One Big Beautiful bill with no national discussion about whether this is the right policy. Congress has unilaterally decided that FWA is the big winner.

I would have thought that cable companies would be distraught by this, and perhaps they are behind the scenes. This decision must drive WISPs crazy, because the three big cellular companies are being given nearly unlimited spectrum to compete against them, while WISPs are limited to a handful of spectrum bands – which might be shrinking if the FCC finds it necessary to raid 6 GHz spectrum to meet the Congressional directive.

I can’t recall any major policy decision in our industry that was implemented with almost no dialogue or discussion. In the past, we decided spectrum issues through massive amounts of discussion from the industry in the FCC comment process. FWA leaped to become a priority through a few paragraphs in the One Big Beautiful Bill. That’s not how sensible spectrum policy should work.