By Hon. Cory Gardner, NCTA President & CEO
Washington is finally having the right conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. That’s good news. But much of the debate overlooks the network Americans rely on every day.
AI doesn’t end in a data center. It doesn’t end at a fiber network. It certainly doesn’t end at a cell tower. It ends where people work, learn, manufacture, receive health care, and live. And overwhelmingly, that’s over Wi-Fi.
Every AI request follows the same journey. It begins in a data center, travels over high-capacity broadband networks, and reaches users over Wi-Fi. That last hundred feet is where nearly every AI interaction actually happens.
If America wants to lead the world in AI, we need to pay just as much attention to that final connection as we do to everything that comes before it.
The AI Future is Here
The first generation of the internet connected people to information. The next generation will connect intelligence to everything around us. That may sound like a subtle distinction, but it represents one of the biggest shifts in the history of networking.
For decades, wireless networks have been designed primarily around people carrying smartphones. AI changes that equation. The future won’t simply involve more devices. It will involve dramatically more intelligence operating simultaneously around every user.
Think about what that means in practice. A family of four may soon rely on multiple smartphones, laptops, televisions, security cameras, smart appliances, voice assistants, and connected sensors. These devices connect over Wi-Fi. What AI changes is how they behave. Instead of occasional bursts of activity, home networks will increasingly support continuous communication among devices, cloud services, and AI agents, creating dense, always-on local networks.
Now multiply that transformation across the economy.
Offices will increasingly support AI assistants, collaborative software agents, smart conference rooms, occupancy sensors, and autonomous security systems. Warehouses will connect autonomous forklifts, machine vision systems, inventory robots, digital twins, and AI agents coordinating logistics in real time. Manufacturing plants will rely on AI-powered robotics, predictive maintenance, and automated quality inspection, while hospitals, schools, airports, ports, campuses, and retail centers will deploy increasingly intelligent, connected systems.
The defining characteristic of the AI economy won’t simply be more traffic. It will be more machine density. Every person, business, and institution will be surrounded by more connected intelligence operating simultaneously, creating persistent background communications, greater uplink demand, lower-latency expectations, and a need for reliable performance in environments where hundreds or even thousands of intelligent devices work together.
Wi-Fi Was Made for This Moment
Those are exactly the kinds of environments modern Wi-Fi was designed to support. That’s why Wi-Fi deserves a much more prominent place in America’s AI strategy.
Today, Wi-Fi carries the overwhelming majority of internet traffic generated by consumers and businesses. Eighty to ninety percent of all smartphone data is ultimately offloaded onto Wi-Fi. Virtually every fixed broadband connection ends with Wi-Fi inside a home or business. Enterprise AI deployments across factories, hospitals, and campuses depend on high-capacity local wireless networks.
Most Americans spend most of their lives in homes, schools, and workplaces. Those environments rely overwhelmingly on Wi-Fi. As AI becomes embedded in daily life, its success will increasingly depend on the performance of local Wi-Fi networks.
Fortunately, the United States made a visionary decision by opening the entire 1,200 megahertz of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use. That decision positioned America as the global leader in next-generation Wi-Fi and accelerated deployment of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7, giving consumers, businesses, and innovators dramatically more wireless capacity.
But that decision is not the endpoint.
Successful spectrum policy anticipates demand rather than reacting after networks become congested.
The internet didn’t stop evolving after Wi-Fi 4 or Wi-Fi 5, and AI will accelerate demand far beyond what previous generations of wireless networking were designed to support.
America’s remaining spectrum opportunities are increasingly scarce, making every allocation decision more consequential. As AI drives an explosion in connected devices and local wireless demand, policymakers should ensure sufficient spectrum remains available for the unlicensed ecosystem that powers nearly every AI experience. America cannot afford to constrain the technology that connects most people and most AI to the internet.
Countries around the world are deciding how to allocate spectrum to support AI, advanced computing, and next-generation wireless technologies. Nations that provide sufficient unlicensed spectrum will attract investment, entrepreneurship, device development, and new AI-powered industries.
The United States has an opportunity to remain the global leader, but winning the AI race won’t depend solely on bigger data centers, faster processors, or more powerful cloud infrastructure. It will depend on ensuring intelligence can move seamlessly from those data centers to the people, businesses, hospitals, schools, factories, and communities that use it every day.
The first phase of the internet connected billions of people. The next phase will connect billions of intelligent systems. America led the world by recognizing the transformative power of unlicensed spectrum and Wi-Fi before the rest of the world did. We now have the opportunity to do it again.
