Last week, Cisco released its Mobile Visual Networking Index (VNI) report and it predicted huge growth in mobile — growth in users, growth in data traffic, and growth in speed of connections. In particular, Wi-Fi is expected to grow by 2022.

Here are a few key takeaways about how critical Wi-Fi will continue to be:

1) The majority of global Internet traffic will run over Wi-Fi.  

2) Offloading from mobile will play a big part in increasing Wi-Fi use.

3) Wi-Fi hotspots will continue to proliferate.

4) With Wi-Fi 6 and other innovations, Wi-Fi will get faster and faster.  

In the report, Cisco confirmed that Wi-Fi will become more critical than ever before. But this presents a challenge for the overly-taxed unlicensed bands that support our Wi-Fi networks. Spectrum that’s too congested could prevent Wi-Fi offload of cellular traffic, which could both impact how your cell phone works and negatively impact the US GDP by as much $9.8 billion by 2020.

Failing to increase the availability of unlicensed spectrum to support this projected growth and reliance on Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies will have very real economic consequences. 2019 is shaping up to be the #YearofWiFi as the FCC considers new allocations in the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands, and it could be just in time.