More WiFi Spectrum

There is more Wi-Fi spectrum on the way due to a US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decision which rejected a legal challenge from the Intelligent Transportation Society of America and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. They asked the court to vacate the Federal Communications Commission's 2020 order to repurpose some of the spectrum that had been reserved for smart cars. The FCC had originally given the auto industry a year to vacate the lower 45 MHz of spectrum. This spectrum will be available for home Wi-Fi. However, it takes a lot longer for the home WiFi industry to respond to new spectrum. It means upgrading home Wi-Fi routers but also adding the capability to use the spectrum to the many devices in our homes and offices. Between this order and the 6 GHz spectrum, the FCC has come down solidly in favor of having sufficient Wi-Fi spectrum going into the future. It’s clear that the existing bands of Wi-Fi are already heavily overloaded in some settings, and the Wi-Fi industry has been successful in getting Wi-Fi 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 Wi-Fi spectrum bands are not enough and that we’ll need even more. But this is a good downpayment to make sure that Wi-Fi remains vigorous.