High Tech Forum's Bennett: More Spectrum Won't Yield Better Wi-Fi

“Shoveling more spectrum” into the pool of available frequencies for unlicensed use won’t necessarily mean faster Wi-Fi speeds, Richard Bennett, High Tech Forum founder, said during a Georgetown University Center for Business and Public Policy webcast Wednesday. Bennett, who worked on the initial Wi-Fi standard, also questioned whether 6 GHz is taking off as a Wi-Fi band. It's expected he will lay out his arguments in a paper next week.

Based on tests he ran, Bennett said Wi-Fi 7 doesn’t work significantly better than Wi-Fi 5, with its smaller channel sizes. “Wi-Fi 5 was sort of the pinnacle of good Wi-Fi engineering,” he said. The original Wi-Fi had 20 MHz channels because only 80 MHz of spectrum was available in the 2.4 GHz band, he said. Now we’re up to more than 2,000 MHz for unlicensed use. Wi-Fi doesn’t require “ginormous piles of spectrum.”

Wi-Fi companies have a financial incentive to push the FCC to make increasing amounts of spectrum available for larger channel sizes rather than focusing on improving the engineering, Bennett said. “Why would you spend your money on developing engineering when lobbying is so much cheaper?”

Bennett noted that the FCC agreed to allocate 1,200 MHz in the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use in April 2020 (see 2004230059), “at the very darkest point in the pandemic, when people were all working at home, and they were probably getting yelled at by their kids about their Wi-Fi.” The 6 GHz order was approved under former FCC Chair Ajit Pai and had bipartisan support.

Carolyn Brandon, a senior fellow at the Georgetown center, asked Bennett whether that reflects a lack of understanding of how Wi-Fi works on the part of FCC commissioners. Commissioners are “policy people, and they tend to be lawyers and historians -- they’re not engineers, that’s for sure,” he responded.

Bennett charged that “consumers are voting with their billfolds” and, so far, are showing little interest in 6 GHz.

The third wave of Wi-Fi 7 routers doesn’t support 6 GHz, Bennett said. “One of the reasons is cost.” A new dual-band router costs about $100, he said. Tri-band routers, which include 6 GHz, cost as much as $700.

However, Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, slammed Bennett’s comments. “The difference between Wi-Fi 5 and 7 is akin to the difference between 3G and 5G,” Calabrese said in an email.

The new generation of Wi-Fi “does everything that 5G does, but with faster throughput, lower latency, and far lower costs,” Calabrese said: “It will be a game changer that further cements the absolute dominance of Wi-Fi for smartphone connectivity indoors, where more than 80 percent of all mobile device data traffic is consumed. Mobile carriers have poor indoor signal strength and far higher costs per bit than Wi-Fi.”

Distances matter, Bennett said. Using a Wi-Fi 7 router, Bennett said he got 3 Gbps speeds at 10 feet from the connection, but about half those speeds at 25 feet. The speeds were about the same at 50 feet, “but that’s actually a problem.” You want the signal to work well within your home, but not in your neighbor’s, he said. Millimeter-wave spectrum “would be much more suitable for Wi-Fi because you can contain it within your house."

Bennett said he’s always eager to test a new generation of Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi 7 offers some useful technical upgrades. He cited multilink optimization, which allows “running two radios in parallel, on different frequencies, so you can potentially get more data.”