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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 83 / Monday, May 3, 2021 / Rules and Regulations include its importance to education, medicine, smart agriculture, and industry. Commenters asserted that benefits from repurposing the 5.9 GHz band would arise from the increased Wi-Fi capacity attendant with the creation of additional channels including an 80-megahertz channel and a 160-megahertz channel.
46. The Commission evaluated the economic benefits of dedicating the lower 45 megahertz of the 5.9 GHz band for unlicensed use by estimating the expected contribution to Gross Domestic Product GDP resulting from additional Wi-Fi traffic once this spectrum is made available to augment existing Wi-Fi capacity. Additional Wi-Fi capacity is valuable as future U.S. Wi-Fi demand is expected to greatly increase. The additional, wider channels made possible by repurposing spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band will allow more devices to connect at a given time. The additional traffic will produce new productive economic activity, including through additional online transactions between internet users and additional transactions between internet users and internet service providers ISPs, which together comprise the added value of additional spectrum. The Commission focused here on the additional GDP
created by transactions between ISPs and their customers since estimating additional online transactions between internet users is difficult due to lack of data. Thus, the Commissions estimate is conservative, capturing the economic value to the ISPs directly i.e., producer surplus, while ignoring consumer surplus gains.
47. Wi-Fi traffic occurs on discrete channels of 20-megahertz, 40megahertz, 80-megahertz and potentially 160-megahertz bandwidth.
Larger bandwidths improve the speed of traffic on the bands and additional channels increase the aggregate capacity of Wi-Fi. The Commissions baseline calculation of the increase in traffic is based on the idea that the additional 45
megahertz of 5.9 GHz spectrum will, when combined with spectrum from the 5.7255.850 GHz UNII3 band, enable Wi-Fi users to access an additional 160-megahertz channel and 80-megahertz channel, two additional 40-megahertz channels, and three additional 20-megahertz channels in addition to channels that are already available, including those in the 6 GHz band. This will give consumer devices additional channels to establish connections to mitigate congestion.
Because Wi-Fi traffic is expected to greatly increase and strain capacity today and in the future, the Commission assumed that the additional 5.9 GHz
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spectrum will be fully used by consumers. Moreover, the Commissions finding that benefits outweigh costs does not require full use of the UNII
4 band. This implies that the Commission can estimate additional traffic for channels of a specific bandwidth as a proportion of new WiFi channels that this spectrum would create relative to existing channels of that bandwidth. For example, there are already two 80-megahertz channels used commonly by Wi-Fi. The additional spectrum would allow use of one additional 80-megahertz channel.
Assuming that this new channel would be fully used, traffic would increase by 50% based on the proportion, one new channel to two old channels. Using this and reasonable assumptions on the distribution of traffic across Wi-Fi channels of different bandwidths, the Commission calculated that Wi-Fi traffic would increase by 8.4%. The Commissions traffic distribution assumptions are specified in Electronic Communications Committee, ECC
Report 302, at 22 May 29, 2019, https docdb.cept.org/download/
cc03c766-35f8/
ECC%20Report%20302.pdf. The Commission noted that although there are means to augment capacity other than through additional spectrum, such as with greater investment in infrastructure, its result maintains as long as capacity remains a bottleneck to service quality.
48. To calculate additional GDP, the Commission multiplied 8.4% by an extrapolation of U.S. Wi-Fi traffic to determine additional traffic per year in gigabytes GBs. See CISCO, VNI
Complete Forecast Highlights, United States2022 Forecast Highlights, at 1
2 2018. The Commission then multiplied this figure by an estimate of the average ISP revenue generated by an additional GB of traffic. Specifically, the Commission used projections of the price per GB for fixed U.S. broadband plans based on the Consumer Price Index CPI for Internet services and electronic information providers and a baseline price estimate from the Commissions 2018 International Broadband Data Report. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Databases, Tables &
Calculators by Subject, Internet Services and Electronic Information Providers, https data.bls.gov/timeseries/
CUUR0000SEEE03?output_view=data last visited Oct. 27, 2020; International Comparison Requirements Pursuant to the Broadband Data Improvement Act, GN Docket No. 17199, Sixth Report, 33
FCC Rcd 978, 1035, Table 3 IB 2018.
The Commission estimated benefits
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only through 2025 to avoid relying on current data for projecting too far into the future, but noted that because its estimates incorporate existing sources of unlicensed spectrum, including in the 6
GHz band, it believed that the benefits of repurposing the 5.9 GHz band would continue beyond 2025. Moreover, although the Commission anticipated that benefits could arise earlier, it did not calculate benefits prior to 2023 to allow time for devices to be updated and adopted by consumers. Using a discount rate of 7%, the Commissions conservative approach led to a present value of approximately $6 billion in benefits in each of the years 20232025, or $17.2 billion over that time frame. If the Commission instead discounted by 3%, the present value of benefits over 20232025 is $19.3 billion.
Alternatively, discounting by 7%, but relying instead on the Census Bureaus national revenues data for fixed internet services, the Commission estimated a present value of benefits of $34.8 billion over 20232025.
49. Costs of Repurposing the Band to Limit ITS Use to the Upper 30
Megahertz of the 5.9 GHz Band. Various commenters claimed that the costs of reducing the spectrum dedicated for ITS
substantially outweigh the benefits of dedicating 45 megahertz for unlicensed operations. However, rather than quantifying costs specific to the reduction in ITS, most commenters pointed to the economic impact caused by automobile collisions in aggregate throughout the United States each year.
Commenters generally referred to U.S.
DOT estimates of the economic impact of lives lost and injuries resulting from police-reported vehicle crashes in the United States as well as other studies and statistics that were not ITS-specific.
Some commenters, however, referred to ITS-specific analyses, including to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA estimates of economic cost savings associated with V2V and other studies.
50. Commenters also argued that repurposing ITS spectrum would lead to costs associated with traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and auto emissions, but in most instances, did not connect these costs to ITS. Certain commenters referred to annual traffic reductions and reduced carbon dioxide emissions associated with V2X, while others claimed that the repurposing could inhibit technology advancements, including in truck platooning, road weather information technologies, and logistics.
51. More generally, commenters expressed concern that repurposing spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band would
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