WATCH: Why does China want to control Wi-Fi spectrum?

Video

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

OPINION:

China wants to control Wi-Fi spectrum, according to NCTA President and CEO Cory Gardner, who says Beijing is pushing other countries to license the airwaves ahead of next year’s WRC-27 conference in Shanghai.

On this episode of Politically Unstable, Washington Times commentary editor Kelly Sadler talks with Gardner, who leads the Internet and Television Association, about why he says the stakes are high for American innovation.

[SADLER] You wrote a column for us a few weeks back talking about spectrum, licensed and unlicensed spectrum. And in 2020, under the president’s first administration, Trump’s first administration, the FCC basically allowed everyone to use unlicensed spectrum. Can you just talk to me about what spectrum is, first and foremost, and what unlicensed and licensed means when applying to spectrum?

[GARDNER] You bet. So I come from a rural background in Colorado in a farm equipment dealership our family owned for 100 years. And so this is all new to me. And so trying to explain spectrum, I come at it from a very sort of simple way to speak about it. Because to me, to me, trying to get your hands around 6 gigahertz and 7 gigahertz, and my kids tease me about saying 6 and 7 all the time, and trying to understand CBRS and the acronyms. So to the person who isn’t living this and breathing this, spectrum is just in the airwaves, basically. It’s the stuff around us that is delivered to your phone. It’s delivered over your Wi-Fi. It’s the waves that get signaled to us that translates into communication, to video, to voice.

That’s what spectrum is. And there’s this tension, this fight over whether you have unlicensed spectrum, meaning anybody can use it, or you have licensed, which means that only the people who buy the license at an auction have access to it. So licensed or unlicensed. And right now the government has all of the spectrum, right? Except for what they’ve auctioned off. They control that. But one thing like Earth, there’s no new Earth being made. There’s no new spectrum being created either. And so all of this is held by the federal government, and it’s extremely valuable. And there’s a lot of fights over it because people want their share. Maybe that’s licensed. Maybe it’s unlicensed. Or maybe it’s even shared. You can actually say, hey, we’re going to license it for this. But if you’re not using it, then we’ll let somebody else use it. That’s the CBRS band that helps us get into it. So it’s very complicated. It’s tricky. It’s nuanced. And you don’t want people’s eyes rolling to the top of their head when you’re talking about this stuff.

[SADLER] In the 2020 FCC move, can you describe what happened with that move?

[GARDNER] Yeah, so in 2020, President Trump made a very good decision, probably one of the best decisions that administration to say, hey, look, understanding that tension between licensed and unlicensed use and understanding the fact that the unlicensed economy, Wi-Fi, has generated nearly $1.4 trillion a year to our economy. Let’s make sure that we don’t end up giving it all the way through or selling it all the way through the licensed approach. Let’s make sure we always have room for unlicensed spectrum. And that’s what’s so critical and the recognition that President Trump did about an all-of-the-above spectrum policy. Yes, he’s going to have licensed spectrum for things like mobile phones, but we’re going to have unlicensed spectrum for things like Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is the workhorse of the internet. Most people think that internet and Wi-Fi is a synonymous term. They get their internet through Wi-Fi. And so by recognizing the six gigahertz Wi-Fi band, and holding that for unlicensed use, it is going to create millions of jobs, trillions in economic activity, and allow U.S. leadership to go through with permissionless innovation. That’s different than what China wants.

[SADLER] So we have spectrum here in this country. Presumably China has their own spectrum, right? And what they do with theirs, it’s all government-run. Obviously, it’s a communist country. It’s all central command. They get to pick and choose which companies get which spectrum.

[GARDNER] And they have to be all owned by the Chinese government.

[SADLER] But this has an impact when it comes to businesses, right, and how they’re going to use this technology or program their devices or to utilize the spectrum globally. So talk to me about that, because we’ve got our own spectrum in the U.S. Companies can build for that. However, to reach a bigger market, you want global dominance; you want your product to work anywhere you take it.

[GARDNER] That’s exactly right. And so we have a number of standard-setting bodies around the globe to try to address sort of the synchronization of spectrum usage. You’re right. The same spectrum that’s available here is also available in China. We manage it our way. They manage it their way. Their way is very much against that permissionless innovation idea that I described. They want to put their thumb on the scale because if every bit of spectrum is licensed, then they can control it. They can control who has it, who gets to use it, how it’s used, what’s over those airwaves. They can yank it if they need to. And that absolutely flies in the opposite direction of what we’re trying to do, which is to innovate, to thrive, to allow people to create new things and new ideas. And so these standard-setting bodies around the globe, though, have a job. They’ve got to make sure that if I take a cell phone from Washington, D.C. and I travel to China or I travel to Europe or I travel anywhere around the globe, that I’m going to be able to make that phone call. I’m going to be able to access the internet regardless of where I am. And so they’re trying to figure out how to set the standards so that Spectrum here can also be used on Spectrum there.

And in China, coming up next year is this convention called the WRC 27. It’s in Shanghai. And it’s at that convention where China is going to try to set the standards around the globe to benefit them. Because if they can change the rules internationally of how Spectrum is used, then they can use that to benefit their own manufacturers.