Rapid Wi-Fi growth in our homes, businesses, and schools puts more demand on the unlicensed spectrum that supports it, and with no end to that growth in sight, spectrum exhaustion is coming quickly. But just how will you know when that happens? Will your devices stop working, or will your once crystal clear 4K or 8K video streaming to your new flat screen TV start to freeze, waiting for more packets to arrive? Without more unlicensed spectrum to allow Wi-Fi to keep growing, you’ll start to see more and more congestion, causing your Zoom or FaceTime calls to pixilate and buffer, your podcast audio to break up, and all the other connections to your favorite apps will get slower.

To avoid that unfortunate outcome and give regulators and technologists a chance to avert a Wi-Fi crisis, two groups of technology economists at Brattle Group and expert wireless engineers at CableLabs spearheaded studies to show when, where, and how spectrum exhaustion will happen – and came to the same conclusion: Wi-Fi is so heavily used that consumers will soon start to feel the impacts of congested spectrum if more unlicensed spectrum is not made available soon.

First, the Brattle Group recently studied Wi-Fi capacity and modeled how Wi-Fi devices and applications would consume capacity over the next five years against the backdrop of U.S. population density. The firm concluded that within five years, as many as 54 million Americans will be at risk of Wi-Fi congestion and exhaustion as demand for Wi-Fi skyrockets.

Now, CableLabs noted recently that the 6 GHz band, allocated for Wi-Fi use just five years ago, is experiencing explosive growth and rapid adoption that will significantly accelerate this year. As a result, CableLabs concludes that over the next five years, home-based Wi-Fi networks operating in dense networking environments—such as apartment buildings and condos—will soon experience spectrum exhaustion, as the number of devices and heavy traffic continue to increase.

Even worse, CableLabs found that if lawmakers limit Wi-Fi’s access to the 6 GHz band, the impacts of exhaustion would “decimate” Wi-Fi’s ability to support consumers’ existing connectivity needs and keep up with the projected massive growth in Wi-Fi demand and device density.

Here’s the thing about spectrum exhaustion. Congestion that is not addressed becomes a bigger and bigger problem, disrupting data traffic on an increasing number of devices using Wi-Fi. It’s a contagion that spreads from one apartment to the next, one building to the next, one neighborhood or business to the next. It undermines our ability to connect with each other and strips unlicensed spectrum of the economic value it has already unleashed on the U.S. economy.

That means to combat congestion, we must preserve the spectrum already allocated to Wi-Fi in the full 6 GHz band, and add to it, ideally with contiguous spectrum in 7 GHz. To make these changes a reality, we urge policymakers across our government to heed the mounting evidence that Wi-Fi’s current allocation of spectrum won’t last long. If not, Wi-Fi’s spectrum bandwidth can’t keep up with Wi-Fi’s growing demand, then American consumers will suffer the most.