Did you know that Wi-Fi boosted the U.S. economy by $995 billion in 2021? You can read more in our new one-sheeter, “Wi-Fi: Billions for the Economy,” but we’ll give you the TL;DR: right here.

That statistic, from the study “The Economic Value of Wi-Fi®: a global view (2021 – 2025) by The Wi-Fi Alliance and Telecom Advisory Services,” was $177 billion more than originally estimated.

542,000 U.S. jobs were generated by the boost in manufacturers and service providers involved in the provision of Wi-Fi-enabled solutions.

A total economic surplus of $838.4 billion was amassed from cellular operators offloading mobile traffic to Wi-Fi and increased speed and Wi-Fi access point capacity for consumers.

COVID-19 made Wi-Fi and unlicensed spectrum even more important and economically significant — Wi-Fi’s economic value exceeded estimates in 2021 by $177 billion. Wireless users in the U.S. increased their communications time spent connected to Wi-Fi by 4% compared to early 2020. 

What’s next? With more unlicensed spectrum available, we’ll have faster speeds, higher throughput and more innovative technologies to meet the needs of consumers and encourage innovation. The economic value of use of just the 5.9 GHz and 6 GHz bands will amount at least to $183.44 billion between 2020 and 2025.

This means new use cases — industries we can’t even yet imagine! For example, new technologies like AR and VR, which will heavily utilize those new spectrum bands, will yield a spillover contribution to the GDP equivalent to $25.78 billion between 2020 and 2025.