Auctioning a Chunk of 6 GHz Would be Phenomenally Bad Policy.

If you follow spectrum policy at all, you will have heard about the C-Band Auction and the 5.9 GHz fight. But you would be forgiven if you hadn’t heard much about the fight over opening the 6 GHz band for an unlicensed underlay. “Underlay” means you allow unlicensed users to operate in the same band as licensed users on a non-interfering basis. While this may seem odd to you young ‘uns, underlays used to be the entirety of unlicensed spectrum. The first authorization for unlicensed was entirely an underlay. No one dreamed of providing a band entirely for unlicensed. Remember Mr. Microphone or your iTrip that let you play your iPod over your FM radio? That’s an underlay in the FM band.  Opening the 6 GHz band is incredibly important for the future of WiFi, particularly WiFi 6. that makes it super important for its own sake. But if you believe we need to “win the race to 5G,” then getting the 6 GHz unlicensed underlay up and running as quickly as possible is outrageously super urgent. As we keep discovering every time we “G up,” we need a new allocation of unlicensed spectrum alongside the new allocation of licensed spectrum to create space for the new stimulated demand. Despite spending the 00s bashing each others’ brains in (and still finding some die hards who hate either licensed or unlicensed), most folks now agree that licensed and unlicensed spectrum are synergistic, and you need a good allocation of both to keep winning (for whatever value of winning) the spectrum race.