U.S. Should Streamline Spectrum Allocation, Congressional Report Says
The U.S.-China Commission also said the U.S. should engage more with international standards-setting bodies.
WASHINGTON, March 16, 2026 – The United States should work to streamline its spectrum allocation process, a Congressional commission on China said in a Thursday report.
The U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission (USCC) said Congress should direct the Federal Communications Commission, which handles commercial spectrum, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which manages federal spectrum, to conduct a study on the issue as a means of competing with China.
“One key advantage China’s approach to electromagnetic spectrum management has displayed in recent years is speed: It issued 5G licenses to its three primary telecommunications providers within months of the international 5G standard being finalized,” USCC wrote. “The United States moved more slowly to allocate spectrum to 5G for several reasons, including an unforeseen legal complication, an unplanned lapse in the FCC’s authority to auction frequency, and the time needed to prepare and conduct auctions.”
USCC was chartered by Congress in 2000 to monitor the country’s trade relationship with China. It has 12 members appointed by the House and Senate majority and minority leaders every two years
The report, led by Eric Hundman, a research director at BluePath Labs, said moving quickly led to more widespread 5G deployment in China, but that the country was “often slow to change its mind when it has put so many resources behind an initial decision.”
CTIA, the major wireless industry group, said the report supported its position that the U.S. should pursue more licensed spectrum to remain globally competitive.
The report “underscores the urgency of freeing up more licensed spectrum to meet growing wireless demand,” Umair Javed, the group’s general counsel, said in a statement. “As their report demonstrates, America's auction-based system is more flexible and efficient than China's top-down approach — and doubling down on that uniquely American model is vital to our global competitiveness.”
The USCC also recommended the U.S. increase funding for spectrum sharing technologies. Spectrum for the Future, a pro-spectrum sharing group that includes consumer groups and cable companies, took that as a win.
“At a time when Big Cellular (or some of the largest wireless conglomerates) are lobbying to dismantle dynamic sharing and concentrate spectrum in fewer hands, a congressional national security commission is telling policymakers to move in exactly the opposite direction,” Dan Wright, the group's policy director, said in a statement.
Engagement with international standards-setting bodies
The report spoke positively about one of the U.S.’s unlicensed allocations too, the GigaHertz (GHz) band allocated for Wi-Fi. China had pushed for mobile, licensed use, while the U.S. allocated the band for unlicensed use. The U.S. had seen “some success in arguing for this use case” with other countries, the report said.
“Had China’s preferred approach won out, its WiFi producers would have been in a better competitive position for global sales, but because those producers’ standards at home do not use this band, U.S. producers have been able to take advantage of this new market for WiFi devices,” the report said.
To that end, the USCC also recommended the U.S. encourage more agencies and American corporations to participate in international standards-setting bodies like the International Telecommunication Union in an effort to shape and benefit from global markets.
“Encouraging corporate participation should be pursued on multiple fronts, because the reasons U.S. corporate participation at the ITU has been lower than China’s are complex and poorly understood,” USCC wrote. “Offering streamlined regulatory pathways to commercializing new technologies for companies that succeed in shaping ITU standards for those technologies could strengthen existing market-driven incentives to shape and adopt global standards.”
The commission said American diplomats viewed Houlin Zhao, former deputy secretary of the ITU, as “using his position to bend the ITU toward Beijing.” The U.S. is running Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the current secretary general, for a second term, “reportedly in part due to concerns about China’s expanding influence with the organization,” but the USCC said “China is likely to push hard for its own candidate once selected.”
The commission said the U.S. and China were likely to disagree on satellite items related to direct-to-cell mobile service at the World Radiocommunication Conference next year, hosted in Shanghai, “in order to minimize the potential costs to their providers of adjusting to new standards and to maximize market access.”
Member discussion