Cable Industry Pushes Congress to Protect Wi-Fi and Shared Spectrum

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2025 – The cable industry asked Congress Tuesday to protect shared and unlicensed spectrum bands as part of the sweeping budget bill Republicans are working on pushing through.

The Senate version of the bill, which the chamber has yet to pass, protects certain military airwaves from being auctioned to wireless carriers by the Federal Communications Commission. It lacks protection for the 6 GigaHertz (GHz) Wi-Fi band that the House included, and also lacks protection for the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), something users – now including cable – have asked for after the Defense Department and AT&T suggested selling the band off for full-power, exclusive use.

“The CBRS and 6 GHz Wi-Fi bands are working – for consumers, for innovation, and for the U.S. economy. Any attempt to claw them back would undermine the very market forces that made these policies a success,” NCTA wrote in a blog post.

“Congress should make clear that these bands are off-limits for reassignment to legacy carriers’ exclusive use, and instead double down on policies that drive competition, investment, and American leadership in the global digital economy.”

Many cable companies offer mobile services through deals with the major mobile carriers, which have become key to their strategy to stave off continued losses in fixed broadband subscribers. Giants Comcast and Charter, who both use Verizon, offload the large majority of their traffic via Wi-Fi and own some priority CBRS licenses. More spectrum for the carriers would also support their fixed wireless offerings, which compete more aggressively with cable.

The Senate language would restore the FCC’s spectrum auction authority until September 2034 and require it to auction off 800 megahertz of spectrum. The military’s lower 3 GHz band and much of its 7/8 GHz band would be exempted from that authority, meaning the FCC couldn’t move to sell it. The bill would also task the National telecommunications and Information Administration, which handles federal spectrum, to start analyzing three federal spectrum bands, in addition to those already being studied under a Biden-era plan.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said on the Senate floor Tuesday that the final budget reconciliation bill was “rapidly taking shape,” and that he was “looking forward to considering it on the floor in the very near future.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, head of the Commerce Committee, however, said Wednesday at a Punchbowl News event that the Senate would probably take until July 4 to pass its version of the bill. Cruz also said he wasn’t budging on his committee’s spectrum language, despite some objections from other Republican senators who wanted more protection for DoD spectrum.

“The deal’s done,” he said. “We stood on the Senate floor, we cut a deal, and the deal is in the bill.”

Cruz said he thought the auctions would bring in more than $100 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated $85 billion. 

Democrats want markup of Commerce language

Meanwhile, Democrats on Cruz’s committee, led by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., urged him Wednesday to schedule a normal markup session in which the committee would debate and amend the text, rather than taking it straight to the Senate floor.

“We write to urge you to schedule a markup of the budget reconciliation text you released on June 5, 2025, instead of fast tracking these significant policies through a partisan floor process,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Cruz.

In addition to the potential for some Defense airwaves to be auctioned, something Cantwell has flagged before, they also took issue with the lack of protection for Wi-Fi.

“This reckless proposal jeopardizes our national security by auctioning off critical defense spectrum” and by “threatening the Wi-Fi that millions of Americans rely on daily,” they wrote. 

New America’s Michael Calabrese also said he feared the pipeline would push the FCC toward selling currently unlicensed bands to mobile carriers.

“A 800 megahertz mandate will pressure the FCC to consider reallocating unlicensed and shared spectrum vital to next generation Wi-Fi and to enterprise IoT, harming our economy that is increasingly dependent on wireless data indoors as an input for everything,” he said in an email.

The senators blasted a provision that would rescind unobligated money from an NTIA program that funds open radio access network research and development, which would claw back $850 million of the $1.5 billion total allocation by the lawmakers’ count. The fund is aimed at standing up an alternative vendor ecosystem and provide more competition to Chinese firms that American lawmakers consider security threats.

The NTIA awarded $550 million from the program under the Biden administration, and recently announced that more than 90 applicants sought nearly $3 billion from the program’s third funding round. That round was focused on software that would help integrate network components from several different vendors. Past funding had gone toward developing and testing network equipment.