New Study Confirms Wi-Fi is Driving Creation of Tens of Millions of American Jobs 

Wi-Fi generated more than 7 million American jobs in 2023 alone, projected to grow to 21 million jobs by 2032  

Washington, D.C – A new study released today finds that Wi-Fi is fueling robust job growth in the United States, with more than 7 million jobs created in 2023 alone. This new analysis, which builds on a prior 2024 study of Wi-Fi’s contribution to economic value in the United States, finds that Wi-Fi is projected to create more than 13 million jobs in the United States by 2027 and approximately 21 million jobs by 2032.

The growth examined in this study is driven by significant direct and indirect employment derived from the well-documented economic value of Wi-Fi from upstream economic activity, such as supply chains. This job creation is separate and apart from the vital role Wi-Fi plays to support hundreds of millions of jobs—in offices, homes, small businesses, and coffee shops—each and every day.

These Wi-Fi jobs numbers substantially outweigh jobs created by growth in other wireless platforms, including cellular technologies, because Wi-Fi is so prevalent in American homes and businesses. In fact, the jobs this study identifies are nearly double the number of jobs the cellular industry has said its investments are creating.

The analysis, conducted by Telecom Advisory Services, also breaks out the employment impact of Wi-Fi technologies by spectrum bands, with rapid employment expansion seen in the 6 GHz band.

• Employment attributable to the economic value created by Wi-Fi technologies operating in the 4 GHz and 5 GHz bands exhibits steady, incremental growth, rising from over 5 million jobs in 2023 to a projected nearly 5.5 million by 2027 and more than 6 million by 2032.

• Employment attributable to the economic value created by Wi-Fi technologies operating in the 6 GHz band—which the FCC only opened for unlicensed Wi-Fi use just five years ago—is already demonstrating rapid expansion. It supported 2 million jobs in 2023 and is projected to reach nearly 8 million jobs by 2027 and more than 13.5 million jobs by 2032.

“Americans use Wi-Fi from the minute they wake up to the minute they go to sleep. It’s no surprise that a resource as critical to our lives as Wi-Fi is creating millions of jobs each year, with the strongest projected job growth in the 6 GHz band,” said Mary Brown, Executive Director of WifiForward. “If policymakers are interested in bolstering and sustaining American job creation and the broader economic benefits associated with it, they should prioritize spectrum allocation to the Wi-Fi technologies that are generating this significant growth year after year.”

This strong job creation further underscores the need to allocate additional mid-band spectrum to Wi-Fi technologies over high-power exclusive, licensed mobile services. For instance, the projected economic value created by allocating 500 megahertz of 7 GHz spectrum to Wi-Fi 7 would generate an estimated annual employment gain of approximately 1.5 million jobs in the U.S. in 2032 alone.

Read the full report here.

 

About WifiForward:

WifiForward is an ad hoc, broad-based group of companies, organizations and public sector institutions working to alleviate the Wi-Fi spectrum crunch and to support making Wi-Fi even better by finding more unlicensed spectrum.

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