Proposed wireless spectrum auction would crush innovation, industry claims in letter to lawmakers

A group of 23 internet service providers in Texas, backed by the industry group Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, sent a letter to two senators Tuesday with concerns about proposed changes to a widely used stretch of shared spectrum featured in the president’s budget bill.

The letter, which was shared with StateScoop, was sent to Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Ted Cruz, both Republican senators from Texas. It notes several concerns about the spectrum policy proposals included in the Senate version of the budget reconciliation bill, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, championed by the Trump administration.

Its proposals would restore the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to auction off certain parts of the wireless spectrum it maintains, including the Citizens Broadband Radio Service, a freely accessible portion of the 3.5 gigahertz band.

More than 1,000 organizations, including internet service providers, hospitals, ports, airports, sporting venues and universities, rely on CBRS, which allows for private, wireless networks with customized controls. In Texas particularly, K-12 schools have relied on CBRS since the COVID-19 pandemic to enable remote and afterschool learning by expanding wireless broadband networks that can connect student households directly to the school’s network.

The 3.5 gigahertz band is also used by the Department of Defense, but the budget bill features protections for uses by the Pentagon, for its radar systems and other, sensitive military technologies. The House version of the bill also does not offer auction protections for the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band, which is also used by ISPs to provide 5G service.

“As Congress continues to work on spectrum policy, we are writing to emphasize the importance of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) to your constituents across Texas and the country,” the letter reads. “CBRS is a proven and innovative method to increase spectrum availability and connect communities that have been left behind. Any proposal that curtails or eliminates the use of CBRS will have far-reaching negative consequences for innovation and deployment for your constituents across Texas.”

Cruz failed last year to pass a spectrum “pipeline” bill. This year, he said that an auction of certain parts of the spectrum is “urgent” to help “preserve America’s global technology leadership, protect national security, create millions of jobs, and improve the lives of American consumer.”

“We are fighting a global technology race against communist China. If we do not catch up and lead, it will be Huawei that creates the backbone of tomorrow’s global communication networks through which much of the world’s economic traffic — and indeed, much of our government’s traffic — will flow,” Cruz said during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last February. “Negative ripple effects cascade indefinitely from there, handicapping our efforts in other adjacent technologies like AI, quantum, and semiconductors and threatening to make America the loser in the 21st century technology race. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Lawmakers project the spectrum auction would raise $85 billion in revenue, which could help offset tax cuts featured in the budget bill, alongside other policy provisions Republicans are pushing to promote innovation, such as the controversial 10-year ban on state and local regulation of artificial intelligence.

The NCTA, a trade association that supports broadband and cable television industries, published a blog post this month noting that CBRS has “sparked billions in investment, given rise to new industries, accelerated domestic hardware manufacturing, and helped to make real progress toward more competitive and affordable mobile connectivity for Americans.” It noted that support for the auction from telecom giants, like AT&T, oppose such growth.

“But some are not happy with this new progress,” the NCTA post reads. “To the legacy cellular carriers, new innovative spectrum models and economic progress are a competitive threat, not a consumer benefit. That is why we see the cellular giants pushing some policymakers to shift away from traditional efforts to identify federal frequencies that can support commercial services, to approaches that would reclaim and repurpose existing commercial bands, redistributing the pie among winners and losers rather than expanding the pie for all.”

“That move would be a massive step backward — and a direct threat to the consumer and economic gains already made,” the post continued.

Michael Calabrese, director of wireless future at the Open Technology Institute, a group run by the Washington think tank New America, said the WISPA letter is “very significant,” but not surprising given that hundreds of local and mainly rural ISPs rely on free access to CBRS spectrum to provide access to fixed wireless internet service.

Calabrese said the auction would also create issues with the military’s access to spectrum, as CBRS includes agreements allowing a variety of users — including ISPs and the DoD — to use the bandwidth without interference from one another.

“Rural broadband providers and enterprise private 5G wireless operators depend heavily on the band,” Calabrese wrote in an email. “Cruz is carrying water for the big three mobile carriers, which wants to clear more than 1,000 current local operators off CBRS to auction it. The problem is that the military radar spectrum is the only band where CBRS could move, something the Department of Defense and his fellow Republicans are opposing.”