You won’t find the term “Wi-Fi” anywhere in the text of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, but a provision authorizing the FCC to auction off spectrum could seriously impact speeds on newer Wi-Fi routers.
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.
The latest generation of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers made massive speed improvements when the FCC opened up the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi use in 2020. Now, the FCC could auction off up to half of that same band to wireless companies, essentially trading Wi-Fi speeds for mobile.
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Americans spend between 77% and 88% of their screen-on time connected to Wi-Fi, according to the mobile analytics company Opensignal. That’s 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.
It’s clear that we use Wi-Fi for the vast majority of our heavy lifting on the internet. So why does Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill trade Wi-Fi speeds for mobile? Put simply, the government wants the money.
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“Because spectrum auctions allow the government to get revenue without raising taxes, spectrum auctions frequently show up in budget bills,” writes Harold Feld, an analyst with the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “In effect, this amounts to treating spectrum as a piggy bank rather than a vital national resource, which makes for lousy spectrum policy.”
The last spectrum auction generated $22 billion in revenue 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.
This isn’t the first time the mobile industry has attempted to commandeer that valuable spectrum. When the FCC first opened up 6GHz in 2020, then-FCC Chair Ajit Pai -- who was appointed by Trump -- wrote that keeping the band open to Wi-Fi “promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum” than using it for cellular networks.
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