Latest news with #spectrum
Bloomberg
17 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Senate Confirms Official to Lead $42.5 Billion Broadband Program
The US Senate confirmed Arielle Roth to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department branch responsible for administering broadband funding and managing federal spectrum use. The vote on Wednesday was 52-42. Roth comes to the post from the office of Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican head of the Senate Commerce Committee, where she worked as his telecom policy director.
CNET
6 days ago
- Business
- CNET
Wi-Fi Experts Reveal How Trump's Budget Bill Could Slow Down Your Wi-Fi
You won't find the term 'Wi-Fi' anywhere in the text of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, but a provision authorizing the FCC to auction off spectrum could seriously impact speeds on newer Wi-Fi routers. Every wireless device, from garage door openers to baby monitors, relies on the electromagnetic spectrum to work. But that spectrum is a limited resource -- to open up capacity for one technology, you have to take it away from another. The latest generation of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers made massive speed improvements when the FCC opened up the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi use in 2020. Now, the FCC could auction off up to half of that same band to wireless companies, essentially trading Wi-Fi speeds for mobile. Americans spend between 77% and 88% of their screen-on time connected to Wi-Fi, according to the mobile analytics company Opensignal. That's also where the bulk of data-hungry tasks like uploading, downloading and online gaming occur. For every one bit carried on a mobile network, nearly 9 bits are carried on Wi-Fi. It's clear that we use Wi-Fi for the vast majority of our heavy lifting on the internet. So why does Trump's Big Beautiful Bill trade Wi-Fi speeds for mobile? Put simply, the government wants the money. Locating local internet providers 'Because spectrum auctions allow the government to get revenue without raising taxes, spectrum auctions frequently show up in budget bills,' writes Harold Feld, an analyst with the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. 'In effect, this amounts to treating spectrum as a piggy bank rather than a vital national resource, which makes for lousy spectrum policy.' The last spectrum auction generated $22 billion in revenue for the federal government in 2021-2022. This one is expected to raise $85 billion by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. This isn't the first time the mobile industry has attempted to commandeer that valuable spectrum. When the FCC first opened up 6GHz in 2020, then-FCC Chair Ajit Pai -- who was appointed by Trump -- wrote that keeping the band open to Wi-Fi 'promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum' than using it for cellular networks. In addition to the 6GHz band, the bill also lets the FCC auction off spectrum from Citizens Broadband Radio Service, a 150MHz slice between 3.55 and 3.7GHz that's primarily used by fixed wireless internet providers in rural areas. How will your Wi-Fi be affected? The wireless industry is poised to take control of about half the 6GHz band, the valuable piece of electromagnetic spectrum that makes Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers so much faster than their predecessors. A laptop equipped with Wi-Fi 7 could reach "potential maximum" speeds of 5.8Gbps -- 2.4 times faster than the 2.4Gbps possible with Wi-Fi 6/6E, according to Intel, one of the companies producing Wi-Fi 7-certified chipsets. The median internet speed in the US currently sits around 288Mbps, which is roughly 20 times slower than 5.8Gbps. But like data consumption, the appetite for faster internet speed grows every year: Nielsen's law of internet bandwidth finds that a high-end internet user's connection speed grows by roughly 50% each year, doubling every 21 months -- an observation that has held true since 1983. As more and more people opt for gigabit internet speeds, the 6GHz band becomes even more essential. Wi-Fi 7 routers doubled the channel size of the 6GHz band, going from 160MHz to 320MHz. It's like a highway going from two to four lanes -- traffic can flow more easily without hitting jams. A slew of new devices are equipped to take advantage of 6GHz, including the latest iPhones, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones, MacBooks, iPads, PlayStation 5 Pro, and Xbox Series X and S gaming consoles. The other bands used by Wi-Fi routers, 2.4 and 5GHz, are so well-entrenched at this point in every house in America that it would be impossible to budge them out. But because 6GHz is relatively new, there aren't as many devices operating on that band. But 6GHz may be getting crowded with Wi-Fi devices sooner than we think. CableLabs, a nonprofit funded by cable industry companies, ran a simulation based on five years of growing Wi-Fi demand for 6GHz in a 144-unit building. It found that 6GHz will quickly approach exhaustion in high-density environments like this. '6GHz seems like a lot of spectrum, but when you look at it in a scenario where there's 144 Wi-Fi networks in a building with all these devices, it doesn't quite go as far as you think,' Mark Walker, VP of technology policy at CableLabs, told CNET. Hitting that limit on the 6GHz band would mean different things for different applications, and it's most likely to happen during the 'internet rush hour,' or between 7 and 11 p.m.. 'That's when you start to see latency and packet loss creep up,' Walker said. 'For something like email, that's not super critical. If your email comes 2 seconds later, you don't even know. But if my voice comes 5 seconds later on a video call, the call is effectively over.' Why the mobile industry wants 6GHz Mobile carriers are always extremely thirsty for more spectrum, but it's unclear how much they really need 6GHz. 'There is no pressing need that I feel like we have to go out and acquire spectrum in the next 12, 24, even 36 months,' AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said at a conference just last month. Similarly, Verizon Executive VP Sowmyanarayan Sampath said, 'We have almost unlimited spectrum' in May 2024. T-Mobile also said last year that it's only used about 60% of the spectrum it already has. That said, a J.D. Power survey from January found that demand for data is increasing among wireless customers, and with it, network problems -- something that the 6GHz band would certainly help with. Desroches also noted that new spectrum could be used to boost AT&T's wireless home internet service, AT&T Internet Air. (I got paltry average download speeds of 5.86Mbps when I tested the service last year.) AT&T cheered the spectrum news in the budget bill, writing in a statement that it will help the company 'meet soaring consumer demand and keep the US technologically competitive with other countries.' Fixed wireless providers could also be affected I've focused mostly on the impact on Wi-Fi speeds, but fixed wireless internet providers in rural areas are also at risk of losing CBRS spectrum. It's not just internet providers, either -- more than 1,000 organizations use these airwaves, including hospitals, airports, sporting venues and universities, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. With less space available in these frequencies, service could be severely diminished. The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless ISPs, sent a letter to the FCC on Tuesday asking it to reconsider auctioning off CBRS spectrum. 'WISPA's members rely on the band to provide essential and reliable broadband services to hundreds of thousands of end users, many of whom live and work in rural communities, or other sparsely populated areas, where competitive choice is lacking,' the letter says. There are a lot of ways the FCC can go with this spectrum auction, and there will certainly be plenty of lobbying by wireless carriers, Wi-Fi advocates and rural internet providers before the dust settles. But we all use these airwaves every day, and the FCC's decisions will impact us one way or another.
Phone Arena
11-07-2025
- Business
- Phone Arena
T-Mobile's acquisition of UScellular assets is now one step closer to taking place
It's one down, one to go for T-Mobile 's acquisition of UScellular assets. Requiring approval from both the FCC and the Justice Department, today the latter has given the deal its blessing. The DOJ said that it will not seek an injunction to block the transaction. Back in May 2024, T-Mobile agreed to pay $2.4 billion in cash and assume $2 billion of UScellular debt to acquire wireless customers, retail stores, and 30% of the spectrum assets owned by the nation's fifth-largest wireless carrier. That spectrum includes airwaves in the 600 MHz, 700 MHz A Block, PCS, AWS, 2.5 GHz, and 24 GHz (mmWave) frequencies. T-Mobile is a step closer to acquiring UScellular assets after obtaining DOJ approval for the deal. | Image credit-UScellular That haul includes key frequencies used by T-Mobile, such as the 2.5 GHz mid-band airwaves employed for its Ultra Capacity 5G service, the 600 MHz low-band spectrum used for the carrier's Extended Range 5G service, and the 24 GHz high-band spectrum used for its rarely found mmWave service. Heck, T-Mobile might have entered into this deal specifically to pick up these airwaves. Remember, the carrier paid $26 billion to buy Sprint just for its rival's hoard of 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum, which has helped T-Mobile become the 5G leader in the U.S. Even though the DOJ is letting the transaction go through, it did express some concern about competition in wireless and whether there is enough spectrum available to generate competition. The Justice Department also said in its press release that during the investigation, it considered what U.S. wireless customers would have to deal with if UScellular left the market, what benefits consumers might get from allowing the deal to close, and what the result might be from further consolidation in spectrum holdings. The DOJ also investigated what might happen to UScellular subscribers if the carrier survived as an ongoing firm. The Justice Department determined that, should the DOJ block the deal, UScellular "could not keep up with the escalating cost of capital investments in technology required to compete vigorously in the relevant market. This would, in turn, lead to the slow degradation of its network quality." The DOJ compared this outcome with comments made by T-Mobile , saying that it will combine the two networks so that UScellular customers will experience faster data speeds after the transaction closes. At the same time, T-Mobile customers will get better service in rural markets. It's a win-win for all. -U.S. Department of Justice The DOJ also noted that this is "a pivotal moment for the wireless industry." After years of consolidation in the wireless industry thanks to acquisitions, the Big 3 account for more than 90 percent of the roughly 335 million mobile subscriptions in the U.S. Whether this is a positive or negative statistic won't be known until sometime in the future. In 2019, when T-Mobile acquired Sprint, the DOJ feared that the merger would allow the remaining big three (AT&T, T-Mobile , and Verizon) to harm consumers through coordination, leading to "higher prices, reduced innovation, reduced quality, and fewer choices." The T-Mobile -Sprint deal also resulted in less competition to sell wireless service wholesale to MVNOs. T-Mobile and Sprint had been battling for this business. With the acquisition, that competition was gone. The Big 3 also controls 80% of the mobile wireless spectrum used in the U.S. The DOJ writes, "It is of concern to the United States that continued spectrum aggregation by the Big 3 threatens to impede the path for a fourth national player to emerge and challenge the entrenched incumbents with new and innovative offerings. Where future spectrum consolidation transactions threaten this path, the Antitrust Division stands ready to investigate and, if warranted by the facts and evidence, use its enforcement power to protect competition and American consumers." With this lukewarm approval, all that is needed is for the FCC to approve the deal, and the transaction will be ready to close. Secure your connection now at a bargain price! We may earn a commission if you make a purchase Check Out The Offer
Bloomberg
10-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Justice Department Won't Challenge T-Mobile Deal for US Cellular
The Justice Department won't challenge T-Mobile US Inc. 's $4.4 billion purchase of US Cellular Corp. 's wireless operations and some of its spectrum assets, despite some concerns about the deal. 'After a thorough investigation, the Antitrust Division determined prudentially not to seek an injunction to prevent T-Mobile from closing on its proposed acquisition of US Cellular,' DOJ antitrust head Gail Slater said in a statement Thursday.
Globe and Mail
10-07-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
AmpliTech Group Poised to Benefit from New Federal 'One Big Beautiful Bill' Supporting Private 5G and ORAN Rollouts
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y., July 10, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AmpliTech Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMPG, AMPGW), a designer, developer, and manufacturer of state-of-the-art signal processing components and complete 5G/6G systems, including advanced Open RAN (ORAN) radios for private and public 5G networks, announced that the recently signed One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), as per below company internal analysis, positions the company for accelerated growth in the 5G and ORAN markets. Spectrum Access The landmark OBBB legislation restores the FCC's authority to conduct critical mid and low-band spectrum auctions and introduces tax incentives that enable businesses to immediately expense equipment purchases related to broadband and wireless infrastructure buildouts. These provisions directly support the growth of private 5G networks and ORAN deployments, markets in which AmpliTech holds significant technological and operational advantages. 'The passage of the OBBB is a win for American innovation and for AmpliTech,' said Fawad Maqbool, CEO of AmpliTech Group. 'Access to newly available mid-band spectrum and expanded tax incentives will empower our customers to deploy next-generation private 5G and ORAN networks with lower upfront costs and faster ROI, accelerating industry-wide adoption of our radios and advanced signal processing technologies.' Sales Momentum AmpliTech, which recently announced nearly $3 million in follow-on purchase orders as part of its previously disclosed $40 million Letter of Intent (LOI) with a Tier 1 Mobile Network Operator, anticipates that the OBBB will further drive demand for its ORAN 64T64R radios and private 5G Network-in-a-Box solutions. As the FCC prepares to release new mid-band spectrum, enterprises, campuses, and critical infrastructure operators are expected to scale private 5G initiatives, creating a robust pipeline of opportunities for AmpliTech's radio and amplifier product lines. AmpliTech Advantages AmpliTech's cutting-edge ORAN radios and private 5G ORAN networks deliver ultra-low latency for seamless and instant communication, directly enabling fully automated vehicles or robotaxis, and the Metaverse's AR/VR among other critical applications such as Tele-medicine and tele-robotics. The high data throughput of up to 1.4 Gbps and ultra-low latency ensures fast and reliable data transmission that is ideal for mission-critical applications requiring real-time responsiveness. Industries such as smart cities, private 5G, and defense can greatly benefit from its capabilities. The OBBB's provisions to support domestic infrastructure investment and prioritize U.S.-based manufacturers align with AmpliTech's commitment to delivering high-performance, American-made wireless and quantum signal processing solutions. 'This bill provides the tailwinds needed for customers to move forward with network modernization, enabling AmpliTech to deliver on our mission of providing true ORAN flexibility while reducing network operating costs,' added Maqbool. 'We are ready to support the industry's shift to a more open, efficient, and secure wireless ecosystem.' Short-Term Upside Additionally, the OBBB provides the policy and economic framework needed to accelerate FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) and last-mile wireless adoption, creating immediate and mid-term demand tailwinds for AMPG's products. Long-Term Growth As fiber becomes prohibitively expensive to expand to edge areas, the bill's incentives and spectrum availability make FWA a practical, scalable replacement, aligning directly with AMPG's roadmap to replace cable, fiber, and wired infrastructure with advanced wireless solutions. AmpliTech will continue to update shareholders as the OBBB's implementation timeline and upcoming FCC auctions progress, while pursuing additional opportunities under the bill's incentive frameworks. For more information on AmpliTech's private 5G and ORAN products, visit About AmpliTech Group AmpliTech Group, Inc., comprising five divisions—AmpliTech Inc., Specialty Microwave, Spectrum Semiconductors Materials, AmpliTech Group Microwave Design Center, and AmpliTech Group True G Speed Services—is a leading designer, developer, manufacturer, and distributor of cutting-edge radio frequency (RF) microwave components and 5G network solutions. Serving global markets including satellite communications, telecommunications (5G & IoT), space exploration, defense, and quantum computing, AmpliTech Group is committed to advancing technology and innovation. For more information, please visit Safe Harbor Statement This release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements. These statements appear in several places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Company, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things, that the signing of the OBBB will lead to the growth of private 5G networks and ORAN deployments, the Tier 1 Mobile Network Operator will continue with follow-on purchase orders, the adoption of the OBBB will lead to the purchase of the Company's products in the short- and long- term. . The words "may" "would" "will" "expect" "estimate" "anticipate" "believe" "intend" for 5G orders and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements because of various factors. Other risks are identified and described in more detail in the 'Risk Factors' section of the Company's filings with the SEC, which are available on our website and with the SEC at We undertake no obligation to update, and we do not have a policy of updating or revising these forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable law. Contacts: Investor Social Media X: @AMPG_IR StockTwits: @AMPG_IR Company Contact: Jorge Flores Tel: 631-521-7831 Investors@ ADDITIONAL COVERAGE Maxim Group LLC's research department currently covers AmpliTech Group and certain research reports may be available to current AmpliTech Group shareholders. Please email: rep@ for more information.
