President Donald Trump is backing a House budget bill that would require the government to auction off 600 megahertz of spectrum to raise many billions for the U.S. Treasury over ten years.
“We must maintain our status as the Worldwide Leader in WiFi, 5G, and 6G, connecting every American to the World’s BEST Networks, while also keeping everyone safe,” he wrote in a post Tuesday on his social media platform Truth Social. “Bottom line, I am going to free up plenty of SPECTRUM for auction, so Congress must put 600 MHz in ‘THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL.’”
The bill would restore the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to auction spectrum and mandate it sell 600 megahertz for the purpose of mobile or fixed broadband, while protecting the military’s prized lower 3 GHz band and the 6 GHz band used for Wi-Fi from counting toward the total. It’s part of a sweeping budget reconciliation package that still needs one more committee approval before a House floor vote.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would raise $88 billion in auction revenue over 10 years, as lawmakers said they expected.
The wireless industry has been pushing hard for the inclusion of such a spectrum pipeline and wants Congress to push the bill through.
“We urge Congress to advance this legislation quickly so that America’s wireless providers can put these airwaves to work,” Ajit Pai, CEO of CTIA, the industry’s main trade group, said in a statement when the spectrum language was released. Pai led the FCC under the first Trump administration and took over at CTIA on April 1.
The bill’s protection of the lower 3 GHz tracks with a compromise the Defense Department floated earlier this year – and Trump’s plan to build a missile defense system dubbed the Golden Dome. The military and allied lawmakers had opposed a spectrum pipeline generally, given the mobile industry’s desire to access a slice of the lower 3 GHz for their networks. DoD has said vacating the band would be time consuming and costly.
In the Senate, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has been the biggest proponent of including a pipeline along with restoring FCC auction authority. A bill he introduced last Congress would have set a much larger target at 2,500 megahertz.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the top Democrat on Cruz’s committee, reiterated her opposition to the House plan in response to Trump’s post.
“National Security and Defense Republicans and Democrats were adamant last year that DoD spectrum couldn’t be given away because of the national security implications,” Cantwell said in a statement. “The House plan to sell 600 MHz of spectrum would punch a gaping hole in our defenses.”
Also in the Defense proposal was a plan to move some users in the Citizen Broadband Radio Service, a shared band, and auction part of it off to the wireless carriers, something strongly opposed by cable operators and wireless ISPs that use the band. AT&T had put forward a similar plan last fall that involved auctioning the entire CBRS band to get the 5G industry more full-power airwaves.
Blair Levin, policy analyst at New Street Research, said in an investor note Wednesday that Trump’s support might be a bad sign for CBRS users.
“The combination of the House bill and the Presidential endorsement suggests to us the proposal, which mirrors an [AT&T] proposal from last year, has significant momentum,” Levin wrote. “That is a positive for the exclusive wireless providers and a negative for cable companies who would have to move their CBRS operations.”
Some House Democrats and Spectrum for the Future, a pro-CBRS group representing the cable companies and some consumer groups, had called for CBRS protections in the bill, but no such amendments were introduced before the spectrum language was cleared by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. Broadband Breakfast