Tag Archives: WiFi

Using Unlicensed Spectrum for D2D

The FCC recently adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that asks if it makes sense to give satellite providers access to unlicensed WiFi spectrum to support Direct-to-Device cellular service. The NPRM specifically looks at the use of 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz. The NPRM specifically rejected the idea of using 900 MHz for satellite service.

The FCC seems all-in on the idea of satellite cellular service and has taken a number of steps recently that favor this budding industry. However, Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democratic commissioner, voiced concern about how using this spectrum might affect the many devices that rely on WiFi spectrum today.

It seems like a valid concern. WiFi has turned out to be the most important and valuable spectrum we have. The whole broadband world seems to run off WiFi modems in homes and businesses. We have outdoor WiFi hotspots to provide outdoor broadband access. WISPs largely rely on WiFi spectrum to deliver fixed wireless broadband to rural homes.

It’s easy to understand why the FCC would consider this. The agency is facing huge demand for spectrum from multiple industries. Cellular carriers want more spectrum to get ready for the upcoming introduction of 6G. Cellular carriers also need to feed the rapidly growing FWA home broadband industry. Satellite companies have an insatiable demand for spectrum since they envision eventually launching hundreds of thousands of broadband satellites. And now, the satellite cellular companies want to blanket the Earth with competing networks to deliver outdoor cellular service, and the Direct-to-Device (D2D) carriers have already requested approval to launch tens of thousands of satellites to provide outdoor cellular service. There are more requests for spectrum than what is available, so the FCC seems willing to raid the public WiFi bands to support a new industry.

This is not the first time that the FCC has allowed others to share WiFi spectrum. A number of years ago, the FCC allowed cellular carriers to use WiFi spectrum in busy markets. I recall a report from university students in Chicago who had documented that cellular usage of WiFi had killed outdoor WiFi on their campus. I don’t know if cellular companies are still dipping into WiFi now that they have been able to get more spectrum, but this was a failed effort that favored the carriers over the normal users of WiFi.

What seems to be different today is that the FCC is unabashedly pro-satellite. They seem to be giving satellite companies everything they ask for. It’s not unusual for regulators to make it easy for new technologies – the FCC took a hands-off approach to the creation of the Internet. But there seems to be a lot of risk in allowing satellite companies to broadcast WiFi from space. This idea is clearly favoring satellite carriers over WISPs.

I talked to several wireless engineers about the proposed use of WiFi spectrum, and they all voiced concerns. The satellites would blanket the countryside with new WiFi spectrum. The engineers told me that it is impossible for this to be completely neutral for a WISP. Every outdoor receiver will perceive the new use of the spectrum as interference. They said there was no way to tell how bad this might be without trying it, and that sounds like a scary experiment if it turns out that the impact is severe. It’s easy for the FCC to allow a new use of spectrum, but it’s unlikely that it would be undone quickly if there is a problem.

This is out of character for the historically slow and cautious approach that the FCC has always taken with spectrum ideas. And that’s even more the case when we’re talking about WiFi spectrum, which has proven its value many times over.

The Need for Public WiFi

One of the most interesting positive things that came out of the COVID pandemic was that communities and organizations across the country deployed public WiFi hotspots. This was done at the time to support students and workers who were expected to find a way to work remotely. And this worked well in a lot of places, and I’ve talked to communities who said the public flocked to the free WiFi during the pandemic.

There was another benefit of the free hot spots – they created places where people who couldn’t afford broadband suddenly had a place to access the Internet. This number of people varies by community, but the nationwide numbers suggest that around 14% of homes don’t have a home broadband solution, and as many as 80% of those folks say they would buy a home broadband solution if they could afford it.

As I wrote about in a recent blog, the number of homes without broadband is unfortunately growing due to affordability issues related to the other increasing costs of daily life like rent, food, health care, and transportation. An increasing number of homes are finding it harder to maintain their broadband connection. Several ISPs have told me about a growing number of broadband customers that regularly disconnect and then reconnect broadband during the year depending on their ability to pay the bill.

I recently realized that a huge percentage of the pandemic-inspired hot spots are gone. In some cases, the WiFi radios installed in 2000 are wearing out, and there is no funding to replace them. Other communities have turned off public WiFi because nobody is paying for the underlying broadband connection. In other cases, there is nobody who wants the responsibility of maintaining and operating the WiFi network.

There are also social issues involved in the hot spot issue. I’ve talked to a few communities that disconnected public WiFi because they didn’t like that it continued to attract people to congregate near hotspots after the end of the pandemic. They didn’t want people congregating in business or tourist districts and sometimes worried about public safety when people were using free WiFi after dark.

A decade ago, there was also a national trend for restaurants and stores to offer free WiFi. That trend has reversed, and there are far fewer places today that offer free WiFi to the public. Many businesses just stopped offering the service. A lot more put the WiFi behind passwords so that it was only easily available to customers. Many have redirected the WiFi signal to serve indoors and not to the nearby sidewalks and parking lots.

I think that one of the reasons for the decreasing interest in deploying public WiFi is a perception that everybody has a cellphone and doesn’t need public WiFi. I worked with the local social agencies in a large suburb of a major city last year, and I learned that a surprising number of people with cellphones don’t have a monthly cellular plan and only use their cellphone where they can find a public WiFi connection. But even people with expensive cellular plans have a skimpy data cap that means they must find WiFi to make it through the month.

There is one hopeful trend. I’ve seen a dozen communities that have deployed WiFi in public parks in recent years. The only downside of these deployments is that the WiFi would probably benefit the public more if it were near where people live. There are also some state programs that are supporting public WiFi, like a recent one in New Mexico. But unfortunately, for every new public hot spot being created, my guess is that a dozen are fading away. That number might be an exaggeration, but the trend is in that direction.

There was a lot of hope that BEAD nondeployment funds could be used to fund public WiFi. My guess is that, even if those funds are ever released, the funds will only be allowed to be use for specific uses that probably won’t include public WiFi. This is an issue that local and state governments can address. Of all of the broadband fixes available in the world, this is one of the lowest-cost ways to bring better broadband to communities. Unless we get a working permanent replacement for something like the ACP plan that subsidized home broadband, there are going to be a lot of homes where public WiFi is a necessity.

The Myth of Cellphone-only Users

A recent survey by Pew Research shows that in 2025, 16% of Americans used a smartphone as their only source of broadband. The percentage has grown a bit over previous surveys. I’ve seen articles in the popular press that tout this, and similar surveys, as proof that young people find cellphones to be equivalent to home broadband. These articles imply that, as today’s youth become a bigger segment of the population, broadband will wane in popularity.

Anybody who is touting this idea didn’t take a very hard look at the Pew survey results. A deeper look at the survey results shows that the percentage of people relying on a cellphone as the only source of broadband varies by household income. 34% of people with household income under $30,000 use a cellphone as the only source of broadband, while only 4% of people with a household income over $100,000 choose a cellphone as the only source of broadband. The survey shows that as household income climbs, a greater percentage of households subscribe to broadband. It’s not hard to infer that most of those who live in homes with incomes under $30,000 would choose to buy home broadband if they could afford it.

This is not to say that there are not people who choose to use a cellphone as the only source of broadband. This might include people who are light broadband users and don’t need a lot of data per month. It’s likely that cellphone-only subscribers don’t watch much video or play games using a cellular data plan. But the survey suggests this might be something in the range of 4% of households.

It’s likely that a lot of the people who use a cellphone for broadband have access to WiFi from other broadband connections – at work, school, or other places that offer free WiFi access. We can infer this by comparing the average monthly data usage on cellphones versus home broadband connections.

OpenVault publishes statistics every quarter showing the average broadband usage for homes and small businesses. At the end of 2025, the average U.S. broadband customer used 767.4 gigabytes of data per month, which was 711.5 gigabytes of download data and 55.9 gigabytes of upload data. Average data usage has been climbing steadily every year, and the average household used 69 more gigabytes of data per month at the end of 2025 than they used at the end of 2024.

Contrast this with the average cellphone customer who consumes an average of around 23 gigabytes of cellular data per month from the cellular network. Cellphone plans don’t support the kind of data used by the average household, and most plans, even those touted as “unlimited”, are capped or have restricted speeds after reaching around 50 gigabytes of data usage in a month. The chances are high that the average cellphone user consumes a lot more data than the national average of 23 gigabytes per month, with the extra usage coming from connections to broadband-backed WiFi. Several recent surveys show that the average cell phone user in the country uses their cellphone for over 5 hours per day. They are not spending that much time connected to cellular data.

There are other reasons why a cellphone is not a substitute for a broadband connection. A cellphone data plan is not adequate to support a household with multiple broadband users. A cellphone data plan can’t support somebody working or schooling from home. Try writing a term paper or creating a complex spreadsheet on a cellphone. While a cellphone can be tethered to a computer or other device for these kinds of functions, most cellphone plans cap the amount of tethered usage to 20 gigabytes per month or less. The average home broadband connection uses more data in the average day than what most cellphone users consume from the cellular networks in a month.

The Pew survey demonstrates a strong relationship between income and broadband usage. A lot of people from low-income households choose a smartphone as the only source of broadband because they can’t afford both the cellphone and the home broadband connection. It’s fully understandable why somebody would choose a cellphone if they can only afford one connection. There is a lot of value in the mobility function of a smartphone that can provide voice and broadband from anywhere. But as household incomes rise, the Pew survey shows an increasing number of homes choose to buy both a smartphone and a broadband connection.

Do We Have a Spectrum Policy?

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.

WiFi is the Problem

TechSee advertises itself as the world’s leading visual agentic AI platform. The company conducted a nationwide survey of  3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.

The following are some of the most interesting responses to the survey:

  • WiFi problems are rampant. 68% of households had a problem with WiFi in the past year. 18% of customers experience problems daily.
  • Coverage issues within homes are a problem. 76% of respondents have problems with connectivity in some parts of their house.
  • Getting help is a challenge. Over half of homes try to fix problems themselves and 62% of them are able to make performance better. Two-thirds of homes have contacted their ISP about connectivity issues in the last year. 39% of those had a technician visit the home, and 20% of the technician visits did not fix the issue.
  • Customers expect their ISP to be proactive. Three-fourths of respondents want the ISP to test WiFi coverage in every room as part of the installation. 56% are willing to spend extra for more equipment if they can see that it solves coverage gaps.
  • Over half of homes have more than six devices connected to WiFi at any given time. The more devices connected, the higher the reported WiFi coverage problems.
  • Nearly half of homes have a router that is over three years old, with only 29% upgrading in the last two years.
  • Many ISPs market whole-home WiFi solutions. Surprisingly, customers of these packages have more problems than average.

What does all of this mean for ISPs? About one-third of customers are willing to pay extra for better WiFi performance, but if they pay extra, they expect coverage where they need it. The survey result that should concern ISPs is that nearly half of the people surveyed would switch ISPs to get better WiFi coverage and performance.

There is obviously a big gap between what ISPs promise for WiFi and what they deliver. Every ISP I know tells me that WiFi is their bane and the source of a majority of their customer complaints and unhappiness. Yet a lot of ISPs don’t have a truly premium WiFi service.

I’ve done a lot of customer surveys over the years, and I’m not sure that many ISPs fully grasp that many customers believe that WiFi is the direct signal from the ISP. Many customers use the term WiFi to refer to their broadband. This means they blame every WiFi quirk and weakness on the ISP.

I know a few ISPs that do this right. It’s not cheap to do it right, which means technician time with customers, but here is how the ISPs that do this well handle WiFi:

  • They do the full house sweep at installation and recommend a solution to improve WiFi. That might mean a better location for the primary WiFi router or installing WiFi extenders. They don’t leave an installation until WiFi is maximized. It means being honest about the parts of the home with the strongest and weakest coverage.
  • These ISPs help customers install new devices on the WiFi network if requested. This can be done remotely and lets them make sure the device is working right, and let a customer know if any problems are due to a device and not the WiFi network.
  • Some ISPs monitor WiFi usage and will contact a customer if performance degrades.
  • ISPs that charge a premium monthly WiFi fee are willing to visit customers to rebalance the network if the need arises.

Taking these steps can justify charging a significant monthly fee for premium or concierge service. Too many ISPs charge extra for nothing more than a one-time installation of WiFi extenders. Customers don’t view this as a premium service if WiFi still doesn’t work well.

This seems like an obvious service to offer if 68% of customers have WiFi problems. It’s particularly important if half of your customers are willing to change ISPs due to poor WiFi performance.

Speed Isn’t Everything

The marketing are of the broadband industry spends a lot of time convincing folks that the most important part of a broadband product is download speed. This makes sense if fiber of cable are competing in a market against slower technologies. But it seems like most advertising about speed is to convince existing customers to upgrade to faster speeds. While download speed is performance, the industry doesn’t spend much time talking about the other important attributes of broadband.

Upload Speed. Households that make multiple simultaneous upload connections like video calls, gaming, or connecting to a work or school server quickly come to understand the importance of upload speeds if they don’t have enough. This was the primary problem that millions of households subscribed to cable companies encountered during the pandemic when they suddenly were using a lot of upload. Many homes still struggle with this today, and too many people upgrade to faster download speeds, hoping to solve the problem. ISPs using technologies other than fiber rarely mention upload speed.

Oversubscription. Home broadband connections are served by technologies that share bandwidth across multiple customers. Your ISP is very unlikely to tell you the number of people sharing your node or the amount of bandwidth feeding your node. The FCC’s broadband labels require ISPs to disclose their network practices, but nobody tells you statistics like this that would help you compare the ISPs competing for your business. The cable industry ran afoul of this issue fifteen years ago when large numbers of homes began streaming video, and many ran into it again during the pandemic. It still happens today any time a neighborhood has more demand than the bandwidth being supplied.

Latency. The simple description of latency is the delay in getting the packets to your home for something sent over the Internet. Latency increases any time that packets have to be resent and pile up. If enough packets get backlogged, latency can make it difficult or impossible to maintain a real-time connection. Latency issues are behind a lot of the problems that people have with Zoom or Teams calls – yet most folks assume the problem is not having fast enough speed.

Prioritization. A new problem for some broadband customers is prioritization. Customers buying FWA cellular wireless are told upfront that their usage might be slowed if there is too much cellular demand at a tower. Cellular carriers clearly (and rightfully) give priority to cell phones users over home broadband. Starlink customers who buy mobile broadband are given the same warning. Starlink will prioritize normal customers in an area over campers and hikers. Most ISPs say they don’t prioritize, but as AI is introduced into networks it will be a lot easier for them to do so. Over the last few months I’ve seen that several big ISPs are considering selling a priority (and more expensive) connection to gamers at the expense of everybody else.

Your Home Network. Everybody wants to blame the ISP when they have problems. However, a large percentage of broadband problems come from WiFi inside the home. People keep outdated and obsolete WiFi routers that are undersized for their bandwidth. Customers try to reach an entire home from a single WiFi device. Even when customers use WiFi extenders and mesh networks to reach more of the home, they often deploy the devices poorly. If you are having any broadband problems, give yourself a present and buy a new WiFi router.

Reliability. If operated properly, fiber networks tend to be the most reliable. But there are exceptions, and it all boils down to the quality of your local ISP as it does to the technology. It’s hard to say that any factor is more important than reliability if your ISP regularly has network outages when you want to use broadband.

Challenges of MDU WiFi

Park Associates, along with Xfinity Communities, recently conducted a big survey of multi-dwelling tenant landlords to explore the issue of offering WiFi to tenants. This differs from offering broadband inside of apartments or condominiums units and explored the issues associated with offering WiFi in community spaces or across an entire property. You can download the full whitepaper here. The conclusion of the study was not surprising – tenants like access to WiFi, but many building owners are reluctant to tackle it for various reasons.

The report notes that there are 29 million apartments and almost 10 million condos in the U.S., so there is a huge potential market for ubiquitous WiFi.

One part of the survey asked residents to rate the factors that are important for choosing an MDU. The most important attribute was good soundproofing, but broadband was number two. Broadband was more important than covered parking, a community pool, availability of office space, an on-site gym, or electric vehicle charging stations. 54% of apartment tenants and 61% of condo tenants said that low-cost broadband was important, and just slightly less wanted broadband that was available immediately after moving in. There was interest in having more than one ISP (40% and 53%) and having gigabit speeds (35% and 48%). The demand was less for ubiquitous WiFi, with the importance of WiFi in common areas at 32% and 52% and the ability to roam on WiFi at 29% and 49%.

The surveys of building owners uncovered some important trends. Landlords reported a lot of reasons to want ubiquitous WiFi that are unrelated to providing WiFi for tenants. A lot of landlords are now using smart technology throughout a building to manage a range of devices such as temperature controls, security cameras, security access, and monitoring devices like water leak detectors. Landlords operating multi-story apartment buildings noted that they can get a substantial discount on insurance rates if they have reliable leak detectors in place, since a water leak can be devastating in a multi-story building.

Building owners reported a huge difference in dealing with WiFi and broadband in newer buildings versus those that are more than ten years old. 82% of landlords reported having trouble maintaining device connectivity in older buildings compared with only 13% of new buildings. 77% of landlords reported having trouble connecting to the Internet in older buildings versus 19% in new buildings. These differences must stem from having new buildings that were prewired with fiber and designed with WiFi in mind compared to older buildings where this is an add-on.

Landlords that don’t offer WiFi to residents claimed a number of reasons for not doing so. 69% said that managing WiFi is a hassle. 64% said it costs too much. 53% said that residents don’t want to share a WiFi connection that is available to other tenants. 50% said that WiFi is not reliable. Any ISP or vendor that wants to sell a WiFi solution to landlords should be prepared to address these reservations.

Another issue noted by landlords is that they expect that any technology solution will last at least ten years. That’s been a problem in recent years as WiFi routers having improved dramatically year after year as modem technology gets better and as we see new WiFi standards.

Landlords also expressed a lot of concerns about smart home devices. They want devices that automatically work with existing administrative systems. They are always leery about bringing in different brands for different applications. They are naturally concerned with the cost of smart home devices. There is a lot of concern about the data security practices of smart device makers.

The Battle for Network Monitoring

An interesting battle is underway to capture the market for monitoring devices. The latest entry into the market is 5G RedCap. This is a technology that is currently under development in chipsets and ought to hit the market in 2025 and 2026.

RedCap is the latest attempt by cellular carriers to monetize 5G. RedCap was defined in the 5G specification 3GPP Release 17. The technology allows for 5G devices that are less complex, less costly, and more power efficient than conventional 5G devices like smartphones. RedCap will compete for monitoring devices like sensors that send small packets of information continuously and require a long battery life. This will include devices like industrial wireless sensors, health wearables, and surveillance devices. Traditional 5G is not good for such devices because 5G chips add too much cost and use too much power.

5G RedCap devices will use fewer antennas and will support less bandwidth than a typical 5G connection. Fewer antennas, lower bandwidths, and different modes of operation will help to reduce power consumption. RedCap devices can transmit data without having to connect to a network – the RedCap device can transmit its bits and hope a network is receiving it.

Cellular carriers will be working on ways to monetize the new capability – perhaps by selling monthly subscriptions for all of the devices at a given site.

This contrasts with the other technologies used to monitor devices. For devices inside or near buildings, the monitoring technology of choice is free wireless connectivity using WiFi or Bluetooth. Devices can be monitored with these technologies without paying an additional fee. However, WiFi devices can still require more power than is being envisioned by RedCap. Most WiFi monitoring devices have to periodically be recharged, which is not always practical for a small device like a sensor that alerts the network if somebody walks through a hallway.

WiFi is not a good solution for monitoring outdoor devices that are not located very close to a WiFi network. WiFi also isn’t a good solution for something like a portable health wearable unless the user always carries a cellphone – an impractical requirement.

The other interesting player in the market is Amazon. The company launched its Sidewalk network in 2021. Amazon has created a local network that is established between Amazon devices in the home and neighborhood. The network uses a combination of Bluetooth and 900 MHz LoRa signals. This network can communicate with Amazon from devices inside a home, and the LoRa spectrum can pick up devices outside and in neighboring homes. Amazon says that it already covers over 90% of homes and wants to move that to over 95%.

A fourth technology in use today is using satellites to monitor remote devices. However, the electronics for such devices are neither low-cost nor low-power.

In looking at the various technologies, it’s clear that each technology will find a niche. RedCap seems best aimed at the mobility market. The technology will make it easier to sell wearable technology and anything else that is not stationary. RedCap might always fit into industrial situations where an operator is attracted to large numbers of low-power and low-cost sensors. But RedCap will come with a price, so when you buy a wearable device, be prepared for a monthly 5G fee.

Community-Wide WIFI

Somebody sent me an article from BocaNewsNow that talks about the trend that Hotwire is seeing in communities that want broadband everywhere. Residential communities in Florida are investing in outdoor WiFi networks that allow residents to connect to broadband from everywhere on a property, including tennis courts, lakefronts, and common community areas.

Communities are advertising ubiquitous broadband as an attractive amenity, and homeowners associations are investing in the technology at the prompting of residents.

It’s an interesting idea, but not a new one. Folks might remember the municipal WiFi craze of twenty years ago when cities everywhere were considering installing massive outdoor WiFi networks as a way to provide broadband to everybody. This was such a hot topic that there was even a magazine for municipal WiFi and conventions where folks came to learn about it. The largest such experiment was in Philadelphia, but there were many other cities that tried this on a smaller scale.

All of the early attempts for creating massive outdoor WiFi failed. The main reason for the failure was technical. The technology required deploying large numbers of pole or building-mounted radios that operated in a mesh network. The radios were mounted fairly close to each other so that there was a radio every several blocks in all directions. The advantage of a giant mesh network was that a customer walking around a community never left the network and didn’t have to keep logging in to keep the same connection.

But there was a giant downside that was never solved. The mesh radios constantly communicated with neighboring radios so the network could reconfigure to avoid a faulty or overloaded radio. It turns out that large early mesh networks spent more bandwidth communicating between neighboring radios than in providing bandwidth to users. The whole concept crumbled once a few cities tried this on any scale.

The other issue that killed the idea was that home broadband was improving drastically during this same time period. Speeds were climbing from cable companies and telcos, and folks were suddenly able to buy speeds of 6 Mbps to 12 Mbps, which quickly made the 1-2 Mbps speeds on wireless mesh networks feel glacial.

Over the years, outdoor WiFi technology has improved dramatically like other technologies. Since the early days of the technology, the FCC approved the 5 GHz, and more recently the 6 GHz bands of spectrum for use in WiFi networks. Outdoor hotspots that are fed with significant backhaul can now easily deliver speeds that are adequate for most of the kinds of uses of broadband that would be expected outdoors. Folks can watch videos, join Zoom calls, and use the outdoor WiFi network to stay connected.

Hotwire claims that the demand for outdoor WiFi has also grown due to people now working from home. It’s attractive for employees to take a laptop to the pool or a park rather than be tied to a desk all day.

I’ve talked to a lot of cities that have already expanded or are considering expanding public WiFi to parks and other public areas. The pandemic showed a lot of city officials that there are a lot of folks who need broadband access and don’t have it at home for some reason. It’s one of those amenities that, once you have it, you wonder how you lived without it.

More WiFi Spectrum

There is more WiFi spectrum on the way due to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that rejected a legal challenge from the Intelligent Transportation Society of America and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials that had asked to vacate the FCC’s 2020 order to repurpose some of the spectrum that had been reserved for smart cars.

The spectrum is called the 5.9 GHz band and sits between 5.85 GHz and 5.925 GHz. The FCC had decided to allocate the lowest 45 MHz of spectrum to WiFi while allowing the upper 30 MHz to remain with the auto industry.

The process will now begin to make the transition to WiFi. The FCC had originally given the auto industry a year to vacate the lower 45 MHz of spectrum. The FCC is likely going to have to set a new timeline to mandate the transition. The FCC also needs to rule on a waiver from the auto industry to redeploy technology using the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology from the lower to the higher frequency band. This is the technology that most of the industry is using for testing and deploying self-driving vehicles.

The lower 45 MHz of the new spectrum sits adjacent to the existing WiFi 5.8 GHz spectrum. Combining the new spectrum with the existing band is a boon to WISPs, which now get a larger uninterrupted swath of spectrum for point-to-multipoint broadband deployment. During the early stage of the pandemic, the FCC gave multiple WISPs the ability to use the 5.9 GHz spectrum on a trial basis for 60 days, and many of them have been regularly renewing that temporary licenses since then.

When the FCC announced the resolution of the lawsuit, the agency issued a press release discussing the benefits touted by WISPs for using the new spectrum. Some of them claimed to see between a 40% and 75% increase in throughput bandwidth. This was mostly due to less congestion on this spectrum, which is rarely used. There was little or no interference during the last year. The spectrum also provided a clear path for wireless backhaul between towers. Of course, once this is made available to all WISPs, it’s likely that much of this benefit will disappear as everybody starts vying to use the new spectrum. But it is an increase in bandwidth potential, and that has to mean higher quality wireless signals.

This spectrum will also be available for home WiFi. However, it takes a lot longer for the home WiFi industry to respond to new spectrum. It means upgrading home WiFi routers but also adding the capability to use the spectrum to the many devices in our homes and offices that use WiFi. Everything I’m reading says that we are still years away from seeing widespread use of the 6 GHz WiFi spectrum, and this new bandwidth will likely be rolled out at the same time.

This was an interesting lawsuit for several reasons. First, the entities filing the court suit challenged the FCC’s ability to change the use of spectrum in this manner. The court decision made it clear that the FCC is fully in the driver’s seat in terms of spectrum allocation.

This was also a battle between two large industries. The FCC originally assigned this spectrum to the auto industry twenty years ago. But the industry was slow to adopt any real-world uses of the spectrum, and it largely sat idle, except for experimental test beds. There is finally some movement toward deploying self-driving cars and trucks in ways that uses the spectrum. But even now, there is still a lot of disagreement about the best technology to use for self-driving vehicles. Some favor the smart road that uses spectrum to communicate with vehicles, while the majority opinion seems to favor standalone smart-driving technology in each vehicle.

Between this order and the 6 GHz spectrum, the FCC has come down solidly in favor of having sufficient WiFi spectrum going into the future. It’s clear that the existing bands of WiFi are already heavily overloaded in some settings, and the WiFi industry has been successful in getting WiFi included in huge numbers of new devices. I have an idea that we’ll look back twenty years from now and say that these new WiFi spectrum bands are not enough and that we’ll need even more. But this is a good downpayment to make sure that WiFi remains vigorous.