Policyband

Ultrafast Wi-Fi Needs Access to Lower 7 GHz Band, Analyst Says

Policy analyst Bartlett Cleland says the Charter-Broadcom 10 Gbps Demo at SCTE TechExpo25 Stays a Cool Science Project if Licensed Carriers Can Hog the Airwaves.

Ted Hearn

Nov 5, 2025 — 10 min read

Photo of Bartlett Cleland, Executive Director of the Innovation Economy Alliance.

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BREAKING: WideOpenWest (WOW!) – which is being taken private – Wednesday morning reported lower revenue and a wider loss in the third quarter as broadband subscriber counts declined. The broadband provider said Wednesday that revenue fell 8.9% to $144.0 million from a year earlier. High-speed data revenue edged down 0.8% to $106.6 million. The Englewood, Colorado-based regional ISP posted a net loss of $35.7 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $68.8 million, down 11.0% from the third quarter of 2024. WOW! said it recorded a net loss of about 4,900 high-speed data subs in the period, ending with 457,100, which is down 22,900 from a year ago. WOW! is being sold to DigitalBridge Group and Crestview Partners at $5.20 per share.

Wi-Fi: In late September, at the Society of Cable Television Engineers’ annual trade show TechExpo25, Charter Communications and chip maker Broadcom demonstrated an experimental Wi-Fi router that hit speeds approaching 10 Gbps. The demo showed the potential for lightning-fast file downloads, photo uploads and daily phone backups, and would be a complete game-changer in high-traffic settings like stadiums, hotels, airports, apartment complexes and corporate offices, according to policy analyst Bartlett Cleland, Executive Director of the Innovation Economy Alliance. He warned, however, that unlicensed spectrum could get auctioned, making the Charter-Broadcom effort a nice science project but not much more. “If that happens, the leading cellular carriers, which control more than 80 percent of the country’s mobile spectrum, would further tighten their stranglehold on a market that the Trump administration has warned is overly concentrated,” Cleland said in an article yesterday for DCJournal. (More after paywall.)