Washington, D.C. – The RAND Corporation released a new economic analysis that finds opening up the 5.9 GHz frequency band for Wi-Fi could contribute up to $100 billion per year to the U.S. economy, and provide up to an additional $190 billion in economic surplus. Importantly, RAND lead author Diana Carew also unveiled a new model for assessing the potential value of unlicensed spectrum, meeting a need identified by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In October 1999, the FCC reserved 75 GHz spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band for use by the automotive industry for a specialized technology called Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC). But the market for DSRC has failed to emerge and the band remains unused in most of the country. In response, the FCC opened a proceeding to consider opening the band to Wi-Fi to meet exploding consumer demand.

RAND’s new paper deepens the FCC’s analysis by measuring potential contributions to gross domestic product (GDP), along with economic benefits to consumers in the form of consumer surplus, and benefits to producers in the form of producer surplus.

“RAND’s analysis demonstrates that the FCC could generate billions of dollars of value for the U.S. economy each year by opening the 5.9 GHz band to Wi-Fi. It also confirms that unlicensed spectrum is the incubator of wireless innovation, and at the center of the emerging Internet of Things,” said Ellen Satterwhite, spokesperson for WifiForward, “This research is a leap forward in how we think about unlicensed and shared spectrum allocations and should be helpful to making balanced spectrum policymaking in the United States.”

“The goal of these estimates is to help inform the ongoing debate regarding the 5.9 GHz band,” write the authors, “We believe that decisions made regarding the allocation of this frequency band could set a precedent for future unlicensed spectrum policymaking, especially in the context of higher millimeter wave frequencies.”