Unlicensed Use of 6 GHz Band Seen as Key to Wider Channels, Future of Wi-Fi

"Some apps will perform much better on wide channels not readily available today," said Chris Szymanski, Broadcom director-product marketing and government affairs. Augmented reality and virtual reality “require extremely high throughput and low latency,” he said. Multivideo chat rooms “are incredibly bandwidth intensive, especially as you go to higher resolution,” he said. People want to download video or audio books much faster than they can today, to listen to ultra-high fidelity audio, and are connecting more devices on home networks, requiring gigabit speeds, he said.

“As these homes become genius, you’re going to need to have multiple data streams moving simultaneously,” Szymanski said: More connected devices require bandwidth. More spectrum will also be needed for backhaul, he said: “Having a 160 MHz channel so that there’s no increased latency or reduced speed regardless of where I am in my home … you’re going to see much better, reliable blanket coverage.”

“The technological future of Wi-Fi is settled, and requires 160-MHz wide channels to deliver the level of connectivity needed,” said Mary Brown, Cisco senior director-government affairs. In the 5 GHz band today, “industry can only access two 160-MHz wide channels,” Brown told us. If the entire 6 GHz band is open, it provides “an additional seven 160-MHz wide channels,” she said. “That’s tremendously important in dense operating environments such as stadiums, apartment buildings and transportation facilities.”

The FCC needs to be “relentless” about making more spectrum available, in a “healthy mix of licensed and unlicensed,” emailed Jon Peha, Carnegie Mellon University professor and former FCC chief technologist. “Data rates inside the home should increase along with data rates that ISPs provide to each home,” he said. “Very few households today get gigabit/second Internet from their ISP, so most of us don't need that from home Wi-Fi yet, but our needs will increase every year.”

“I’m somewhat skeptical about the smart-home market, particularly the data rate required by dishwashers,” said Henning Schulzrinne, former FCC chief technologist now at Columbia University. The problem is that Wi-Fi spectrum is congested, especially in dense areas, he said. “You can typically see 20-30 Wi-Fi access points, even in the 5.8 GHz band today,” he said. “In my office, I can ‘see’ 50 different access points, and that's on a university campus, not a residential building. The problem is even more pronounced in high-density venues.” Schulzrinne said the limit on speed today probably isn't the raw speed of the Wi-Fi access point “or the nominal spectrum band available to it, but interference from other access points.”

Demand for unlicensed has been growing for years and “it has finally dawned on enough stakeholders besides the tech companies that there isn't going to be any more unless the FCC authorizes more,” said Harold Feld, Public Knowledge senior vice president. “Every single hotel and convention center, every corporate campus, every home and apartment with its dozens of smart devices, even an entire industry dedicated to connected sex toys, needs more Wi-Fi," Feld said. “No matter how good you are at spectrum efficiency and re-use, you eventually hit a limit.”

Feld said it helps efforts to secure more spectrum that companies like John Deere and General Electric are now involved in advocacy. “There is finally enough political pressure to get the FCC and NTIA hopping,” he said. Republicans in Congress also aren’t focused on deficit reduction, so there's less pressure to hold spectrum auctions, Feld said.

Lack of spectrum for Wi-Fi isn’t the issue, countered Richard Bennett, free-market blogger and network architect. “Every time the FCC assigns more spectrum for unlicensed use, the response of the Wi-Fi industry is to ask for even more,” he said. “At some point, Wi-Fi standards developers need to focus more on efficient, low-latency use of current allocations. Super-wide channels do nothing to alleviate the latency and synchronization issues that plague audio/video applications today, and internet-based web servers can’t keep up with current network speeds.”

Dedicating spectrum to Wi-Fi is an investment in the future but must be balanced “with more structured parts of the overall communications portfolio,” said Larry Downes, director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy Project. As the current system has emerged, “Wi-Fi has proven to be an essential innovation, but it’s still only a piece of the total ecosystem,” Downes said. “For 5G and beyond, we’ll continue to rely, at least in part, on that kind of self-organizing invention process balanced against the more directed forms of R&D that have yielded so much positive disruptive force in the licensed bands.

The FCC should “extend the 5 GHz Wi-Fi band from 5.9 GHz up across most if not all of the 6 GHz band,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America.