Sen Cruz Wants To Sell Your Wi-Fi to AT&T. This Will Make Your Wi-Fi Suck and Your Mobile Bill Higher.

Congress is poised to vote on the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act to fund the government, including a portion drafted by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would both jeopardize the future of Wi-Fi and threaten to kill the growth of private networking. Budget bills often include spectrum auctions to provide revenue to offset the cost of things such as federal programs or tax cuts. This particular budget bill, therefore, reauthorizes the Federal Communications Commission to conduct spectrum auctions (an authority that expired back in March 2023) for 10 years. This alone adds an estimated $70 billion or so in revenue. But the large wireless carriers—generally through their trade association CTIA, but also through its largest member, AT&T, whose CEO has been busy lobbying on this for months—want specific bands of spectrum designated for auction. Now, thanks to Sen Cruz, AT&T and the rest of the wireless industry look like they will get to gobble up half of the 6 GHz band—the spectrum allocated for next-generation Wi-Fi. If this happens, we will end up with Wi-Fi unable to keep up with your home connection, and ultimately slowing to a crawl (as it did when we only had the original Wi-Fi bands available).