This month, the Federal Communications Commission began its first spectrum auction in four years. Congress has directed the FCC to auction additional spectrum over the coming years, selling off slices of America’s airwaves to the highest bidder — almost certainly including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, the three carriers that have dominated every major spectrum auction for decades.
That is worth pausing on. While some slices of America’s airwaves are being sold at the auction block, another is quietly fueling the evolution of the American economy — expanding internet access, increasing competition, and driving down consumer costs.
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That band is the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service, and a new report from multiple coalitions representing the manufacturers, rural broadband providers, and industrial operators who actually deploy CBRS shows just how well it is performing. By every measurable metric, CBRS has become the most widely utilized mid-band spectrum asset in the American economy.
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More than 442,000 CBRS base stations are deployed across 82% of U.S. counties. More than 1,000 different entities operate in the band, from Fortune 500 manufacturers to small-town internet providers. Three-quarters of all private 5G networks in the country run on CBRS. The United States is the global leader in private mobile networks due to CBRS. And more than 10 million American locations now have broadband because of it.
This is the part Washington misses. For years, access to licensed mid-band spectrum has been concentrated in the hands of the three largest national cellular carriers, which took nearly 90% of the mid-band spectrum the FCC auctioned between 2017 and 2022. America does not have a high-power spectrum shortage. It has competition and cellular network density shortages — and CBRS is the most effective tool we have to fix both.
Because CBRS is shared and locally licensed, a manufacturer, a hospital, a school district, or a rural internet provider can build and control its own private 5G network without writing a multibillion-dollar check to a national carrier. That single design choice has unleashed a wave of investment and competition that exclusive-use licensed spectrum never could.
You can see it on the factory floor. John Deere runs CBRS networks at its Illinois and Iowa plants to operate autonomous vehicles and robots. BMW’s South Carolina facility, its largest plant in the world, which builds more than 1,500 vehicles a day, runs on CBRS. Ericsson uses the band at its Texas Smart Factory to build the very 5G equipment that powers American networks, supporting more than 500 American jobs. These are not pilot programs. Manufacturers using CBRS are cutting unplanned downtime by as much as 30% and projecting cost savings of nearly 38%.
You can see it in rural America, where nearly 70% of CBRS deployments are located, connecting families and businesses that the national carriers are choosing not to serve.
You can see it in the economics. An analysis of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport’s CBRS deployment found that improved operational efficiency and a superior customer experience greatly improved its bottom line. When the military deployed its first CBRS private 5G network at a major logistics base, it found that the audit savings alone fully justified the deployment and operating costs, while improving performance and reducing retrieval times. These are just two examples, but they illustrate a broader point: when spectrum goes directly to the enterprises that innovate with it, it creates new economic value.
By contrast, despite the additional spectrum made available to the traditional cellular carriers, their average revenue per user has been steadily declining. It is no accident that the U.S. now leads the world in private 5G with 506 private networks — more than three times Germany’s 150 and the United Kingdom’s 100 — and that CBRS is the most widely used private wireless band on the planet.
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So as policymakers weigh how to manage the nation’s airwaves, they should be careful. The answer is not to claw back or modify the shared-spectrum success of CBRS to hand more exclusive licenses to the same three companies that have shown an unwillingness to use the spectrum they already have adequately, or to innovate and address emerging business models the way CBRS has.
CBRS’s value to the U.S. goes far beyond whatever an auction of its frequencies might raise. It is the working engine of American manufacturing, rural connectivity, and global wireless leadership — and it is delivering precisely because it is shared. The smart move is to protect and expand upon it.
Dave Wright is policy director of the Spectrum for the Future Coalition, which advocates shared-spectrum access on behalf of manufacturers, rural broadband providers, and enterprise users of Citizens Broadband Radio Service.
