Global demand for high-capacity, low-latency wireless connectivity continues to grow, and the 6 gigahertz band of radio spectrum has emerged as a particularly vital chunk of wireless real estate.
Both the cellular and Wi-Fi industries consider this contiguous block, which covers frequencies from 5,925 to 7,125 megahertz, critical. The cellular industry believes the spectrum can provide anchor capacity for urban 6G cellular networks, while Wi-Fi advocates want it for low-latency, multi-gigabit-per-second streaming, augmented reality, and virtual reality applications over Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8 devices.
Unlicensed Wi-Fi advocates, backed by companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, want the spectrum made available as public frequencies that are open to anyone. They are vying with licensed cellular providers who believe the airwaves should be exclusive and purchased from regulatory bodies to guarantee coverage and provide seamless mobility.
Most major global economies have decided to split 6 GHz between unlicensed Wi-Fi access on the lower 500 MHz portion of the band (spanning from 5,925 to 6,425 MHz) and licensed cellular use on the larger 700 MHz upper portion.
The battle lines have now shifted to the European Union, India, and the United Kingdom, as well as other fence sitters that have yet to decide how the critical upper 6 GHz airwaves will be assigned, with Wi-Fi and cellular camps fiercely lobbying their case with regulators.
“Any country that chooses not to allocate the entire 6 GHz band to unlicensed use is putting itself at significant innovation disadvantage and limiting its capacity for economic growth,” says Mary Brown, executive director of Wifi Forward, a Wi-Fi advocacy group whose members include Broadcom, Comcast, Google, and Microsoft.
The US has assigned the full 6GHz spectrum band to unlicensed wireless use, such as Wi-Fi 6E, 7, and 8. Mid-band frequencies such as the 7 GHz band and the 2.7 to 2.9 GHz band are being considered for potential 6G cellular use. Canada, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia have taken a similar license-exempt approach to 6 GHz.
Wifi Forward published a report in 2025 revealing that, in the United States, restricting Wi-Fi to the lower 500 MHz of the 6GHz band could cost over US $1.74 trillion in lost economic value over the following two years. [Editor’s note: The IEEE creates and maintains the set of technical standards behind Wi-Fi.]
“Wi-Fi is already carrying as much as 90 percent of internet traffic in developed economies and that will only continue to increase with AI poised to become the most significant driver of network demand since the emergence of the smartphone,” says Brown.
On the flip side, the GSM Association (GSMA), a trade association representing over 800 mobile network operators worldwide, says it wants unfettered access to the upper 6 GHz band to avoid fragmentation of the global 6G ecosystem and to maintain mobile’s impact on global GDP growth, which it has forecast at 8.4 percent by 2030.
WiFi has historically lived almost exclusively on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The recent move into the lower 6 GHz band in certain countries has, according to Ross Bateson, a senior spectrum advisor at the GSMA, resulted in very low adoption. This makes Bateson question the need for additional access to the upper 6 GHz band.
“In most cities around the world, there is between 0 percent and 5 percent Wi-Fi use in the lower 6 GHz band,” says Bateson, “For Wi-Fi boxes to have this added complexity without any guarantee that they’ll be able to use the spectrum they’re built for is a little bit confusing to us.”
India is currently in a regulatory holding position on the upper 6 GHz spectrum, leaving questions around future arrangements to keep the band exclusively for mobile use or to develop strategies for coexistence.
India has formally designated the lower portion of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed wireless use, and the 6,425 to 7,125 MHz range for licensed cellular. However, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) stepped in to recommend delaying license auctions for the upper band until after the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2027 (WRC-27). Tech organizations continue to lobby against granting the upper band entirely to the mobile industry.
Elsewhere, the European Commission appears keen to avoid a ‘winner-takes-all’ outcome. Its Radio Spectrum Policy Group has recommended that 540 MHz of the upper band is designated for priority mobile use with decisions on the additional 160 MHz (or potentially 125 MHz) delayed until the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference 2027 (WRC-27).
The prospect of a split upper band in EU member states raises technical challenges around coexistence and potential interference. The GSMA’s head of spectrum, Luciana Camargos, has said the approach will not work because mobile and Wi-Fi networks use fundamentally different standards.
“Where licensed mobile and unlicensed Wi-Fi sit adjacent in the same band, as Europe is now engineering, you need guard bands, strict out-of-band emission limits, and power restrictions,” says Adlane Fellah, founder and chief analyst at Florida-based wireless consultancy Maravedis. “The size of Europe’s guard band is itself contingent on what is decided at WRC-27 regarding adjacent 7 GHz spectrum, which tells you how delicate the engineering is.”
The EU is taking a hybrid approach to the 6 GHz band. The lower portion of the band (5,925 to 6,425 MHz) is designated for Wi-Fi and the upper band is proposed to be split, with 540 MHz handed over to licensed mobile and a decision on the remaining 160 MHz frozen until WRC-27.
The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations, the EU’s spectrum coordination body, is examining the feasibility of a hybrid/prioritised sharing model, which would allow the non-priority technology to access priority airwaves, provided it can coexist without causing harmful interference.
The stakes here are high, says Fellah. “Real-time licensed/unlicensed sharing at scale has never been proven in a band this commercially important.”
EU decision makers will be closely watching developments in the UK, where the Office of Communications, the government regulator for communications services, is exploring a proposal for a dynamic spectrum sharing framework for the upper 6 GHz band.
Through a phased approach, this would see Wi-Fi access points gain primary access to the bottom 160 MHz chunk of the band, as well as early access to the upper 540 MHz “mobile priority” chunk, with the caveat of that portion being under automated frequency coordination (AFC) control.
AFC dynamically checks the airwaves and then either allocates or denies Wi-Fi access points connection to specific frequencies, depending on the current level of congestion. The solution could help maintain the flow of mobile traffic in high-density areas, particularly when 6G networks start being deployed around the end of the decade.
Canada and the U.S. already operate similar AFC systems, potentially allowing the same Wi-Fi hardware to operate in multiple regions without separate configurations.
The world is essentially split three ways on 6GHz: the U.S. is dedicating the entire 1,200 MHz band to unlicensed use, China is dedicating it entirely to mobile, and Europe is taking a middle path. That has raised concerns that the next era of wireless communications—headlined by 6G and Wi-Fi 8—will result in the world’s three largest economic blocs adopting three incompatible wireless spectrum models.
China is the only large nation to reject Wi-Fi operations in the 6 GHz band. It was also the first to authorize the entire upper part of the band (6,425 to 7,125 MHz) for licensed cellular, demonstrating a commitment to 5G and, in the future, 6G.
This scenario bolsters a traditional geographical split between device original equipment manufacturers (or OEMs) with, for example, China’s Huawei and ZTE focused on 5G-Advanced and 6G, and the U.S. anchored in domestic silicon and Wi-Fi infrastructure players like Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Cisco. Ericsson and Nokia lobbied alongside the GSMA for licensed spectrum in Europe, where they have most customers.
Uneven 6 GHz policies can make Wi-Fi and smartphone devices more difficult and more expensive to design and develop, says Fellah, and Wi-Fi vendors are already being forced to ship multiple hardware variants, raising manufacturing costs.
“Some suppliers are releasing Wi-Fi 7 access points that either use software-defined radios to toggle between 5 GHz and 6 GHz or omit 6 GHz entirely to keep costs down in markets where the band isn’t available,” Fellah says.
6G smartphones are at an early hardware-prototyping phase ahead of an expected launch in 2029 or 2030. According to John Kuzin, the senior vice president of spectrum policy and regulatory counsel at Qualcomm, the company’s chipsets for 6G handsets are likely to remain uniform across markets.
“There aren’t major challenges to, for example, supporting unlicensed Wi-Fi in the full 1,200MHz in the 6 GHz band, as permitted in the U.S. and Canada, and supporting in other regions of the world unlicensed Wi-Fi in the lower 500 MHz portion of the 6 GHz band and licensed mobile services in the upper 6 GHz,” says Kuzin.
These countries are among those that have agreed on a direct two-way split between unlicensed Wi-Fi in the lower band and licensed cellular in the upper band.
6G base stations are expected to require larger antenna arrays to counter high atmospheric propagation loss and to match the coverage footprint of older spectrum bands.
“For all global frequency variants, we look at how many antenna elements it makes sense to install on a reasonably-sized radio unit that doesn’t weigh too much,” says Per Beming, the head of standards and industry initiatives at Ericsson. Beming adds that base station filter characteristics and power amplifiers must be tailored to suit the specific band, to prevent co-channel interference, and to protect other services or spectrum outside the band.
Ericsson’s suppliers and sub-suppliers in China and India are already working on solutions for local markets, with any compromise “always about judging what the specific market wants and needs rather than any technical difficulties,” says Beming.
As manufacturers and network operators work up solutions for the 6 GHz band, the challenge will be in charting a path that doesn’t undermine the economies of scale needed for wireless innovation, lower hardware costs, and ultimately technology adoption.
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