America’s wireless future is on hold, pending another study. Federal agencies control much of the spectrum needed to build it—and the process for opening those frequencies rewards incumbents for taking their time.
Sustaining U.S. leadership in wireless technology requires more spectrum—the radio frequencies that carry wireless signals—for fifth- and sixth-generation mobile networks (5G and 6G), next-generation Wi-Fi, and other advanced communications systems. Yet federal agencies pay nominal fees for exclusive use of many of the bands best suited to those innovations. Opening them to commercial services requires reallocating them or arranging shared access. That’s where American spectrum policy repeatedly breaks down.
The obstacles are rarely technical. Procedural friction and agency self-interest make reallocation slow, contentious, and tilted toward inaction. Federal users bear the disruption and risks to their missions when they move, but capture almost none of the gains. Even an agency acting in good faith has reason to defend the status quo.
Meanwhile, agencies bent on delay can turn interference studies into a renewable resource for obstruction. A process meant to resolve technical questions becomes a way to keep them open indefinitely. Incumbents invoke “health,” “public safety,” or “national security” without specifying measurable thresholds against which to test those claims. No completed study can settle a question framed to evade an answer.
The public pays for that delay. A policy aimed at maximizing social welfare would weigh economic security alongside national security. Each year a band remains underused and closed to commercial services, the public forgoes the wireless activity it could otherwise support.
The saga of LightSquared and Ligado offers the clearest illustration of this federal incumbent playbook, the incentives behind it, and the public cost. To prevent a repeat, regulators should fund studies upfront and concurrently, publish firm deadlines, and securely share sensitive information with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) engineers who hold the necessary security clearances. These reforms would help the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the FCC resolve spectrum disputes promptly and on the merits.
Licensed to Wait
No case better illustrates the cost of spectrum delay than the L-band saga. For more than 20 years, the same block of frequencies has cycled through approvals, reversals, and regulatory limbo, leaving the commercial use contemplated by Ligado’s licenses unrealized. The case shows how difficult reallocation becomes when the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has a strong interest in the spectrum—and why resolving engineering questions early matters.
In 2003, the FCC adopted rules allowing mobile-satellite operators in the L-band to supplement satellite coverage with ground stations, known as an “ancillary terrestrial component.” The band was a patchwork of international assignments. LightSquared negotiated swaps with other spectrum holders to consolidate a contiguous 40-megahertz block for Long-Term Evolution (LTE), a mobile broadband technology.
In January 2011, the FCC conditionally approved LightSquared’s terrestrial network, subject to resolving concerns about interference with the Global Positioning System (GPS). The dispute centered on GPS receivers designed around the weak satellite signals that had historically occupied the L-band. LightSquared’s proposed operations met the band’s technical requirements but upset neighboring GPS users’ expectations. After GPS interests, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the DoD complained, the FCC withdrew its authorization in February 2012. LightSquared had already invested about $4 billion toward a projected $14 billion network and soon filed for bankruptcy.
The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2015 and rebranded as Ligado. It then spent years making concessions to address interference concerns. Among them, Ligado agreed to reduce signal power by 99%, leave one-quarter of its spectrum unused to protect GPS reception, and coordinate with federal GPS users before each infrastructure deployment.
Federal incumbents still balked. The DoD and NTIA maintained that interference concerns remained unresolved, while the FCC’s engineering analysis found that Ligado’s revised proposal would not cause harmful interference to GPS systems. Relying on that analysis, the FCC unanimously approved Ligado’s modified license April 20, 2020.
Approval, it turned out, was just the opening bell to another round of squabbling. NTIA sought to pause and reconsider the order, the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings, and 32 senators objected. Congress then used the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to bar the DoD from contracting with entities operating L-band equipment unless the agency certified that it would not harmfully interfere with DoD equipment. That restriction gave the Pentagon a de facto veto.
The NDAA also required a National Academies interference study, completed in September 2022. The study reiterated what telecom policy specialists already understood: “It is within the state-of-the-practice of current technology to build a receiver that is robust to Ligado signals” and “all GPS receiver manufacturers could field new designs that could co-exist with the authorized Ligado signals.”
Ligado held a valid FCC license it could not commercially use. Its roughly $10 billion recapitalization in October 2020 remained stranded. In October 2023, it sued the United States in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for $39 billion, alleging that the government had taken its property rights without compensation. The complaint also alleged that the DoD operated “previously undisclosed systems” dependent on Ligado’s spectrum. In January 2025, Ligado filed for bankruptcy again and struck a spectrum-sharing deal with AST SpaceMobile as part of an $8.6 billion debt-to-equity restructuring.
The dispute’s longevity reflects the DoD’s ability to keep its objections too vague to test. Broad warnings about threats to “GPS” invoked safety-of-life and national-security uses without specifying which systems would suffer, where, or by how much. Those claims left no clear standard for resolving the dispute.
Much of the necessary evidence was already available. The 2017 National Advanced Spectrum and Communications Test Network trials found no widespread harmful interference. In 2020, the FCC concluded that the record did not substantiate the DoD’s interference claims. Promptly identifying and testing the operations at issue could have narrowed the dispute to manageable questions—which receivers needed filters, where unused spectrum buffers known as guard bands were necessary, and who should pay.
Good Things Come to Those Who Stall
Ligado’s experience exposes the incentives that reward federal incumbents for delay. Each month of study postpones the costs, disruption, and mission risks of changing operations. Agencies capture almost none of the gains from commercial access, so waiting pays. The same logic gives incumbents reason to submit cautious, high-end relocation estimates and expansive sharing restrictions, making changes look harder and slowing the analysis that depends on their submissions.
Studies can thus become a renewable source of delay. An inconvenient finding invites a methodological challenge, another review, or a fresh round of testing. The 2017 federal tests found no widespread harmful interference, yet shifting technical metrics and a congressionally mandated National Academies review kept the question open until 2022, yielding essentially the same determination. Without a measurable threshold for protecting “GPS” or “national security,” each study resets the clock.
That clock runs against the new entrant. The incumbent keeps using its spectrum while the commercial proponent’s capital sits idle. LightSquared invested roughly $4 billion before losing its authorization. Ligado’s later $10 billion recapitalization likewise remained stranded despite FCC approval.
Ligado’s dispute concerned new terrestrial operations alongside users in neighboring bands. Most current debates concern federal incumbents that must relocate or share their own allocations with commercial users. Those transitions run through the Spectrum Relocation Fund (SRF), whose reviews aim to verify cost estimates and workable transition plans before releasing money.
But studies cannot begin until that review ends. This sequencing adds delay to every effort to repurpose or share spectrum, with prospective commercial users bearing the cost of waiting. Reflexive worst-case interference analysis compounds the problem, letting even remote hazards justify continued caution. To be clear, protecting federal operations is a legitimate goal, but the process nevertheless rewards preserving the status quo, whatever any participant’s motives.
The High Cost of Low Utilization
Every year a band remains underused, economic value goes unrealized. Spectrum’s value comes from the wireless activity it supports, and every access model can create it.
Exclusive licenses generally allow high-power coverage over wide areas, making them the foundation of mobile broadband. One estimate attributes roughly $264 billion in gross domestic product, 1.55 million jobs, and $388 billion in consumer surplus—the value consumers receive beyond what they pay—to each additional 100 megahertz of licensed spectrum.
Unlicensed access supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, internet-connected sensors, medical devices, and countless appliances. It produces no auction proceeds for the Treasury, but substantial value for the economy. Some estimates put that value as high as $2 trillion annually.
Finally, dynamic sharing, such as the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), lets commercial users coexist with incumbents by coordinating access where a band cannot be cleared outright.
But all these models have one prerequisite: access to spectrum.
Most of the value lost to delay is consumer surplus. Some of those gains disappear rather than arrive later. In the CBRS and C-band proceedings, years of allocation delays reshaped competition before the spectrum became available. Ligado’s private losses alone run into the tens of billions of dollars. The even larger cost can be found in two decades of networks never built, capacity never added, and services never launched.
This is why economic security belongs alongside national security in the analysis. Mid-band spectrum underpins 5G, 6G, next-generation Wi-Fi, and the two-way data flows that support artificial intelligence (AI). It also sustains a commercial wireless industry whose scale and innovation are strategic assets in the competition with China.
Reallocation and sharing pose genuine national-security risks that demand rigorous assessment. But that assessment must also account for the economic-security costs of leaving networks and services on the drawing board.
Less Holding Pattern, More Bandwidth
NTIA must move identified spectrum bands through study and into commercial use promptly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Arielle Roth have made progress, including greater transparency. The task now is to turn that urgency into completed work.
First, fund studies early and run them in parallel. For bands requiring federal relocation and an auction, the SRF already can fund pre-auction planning and engineering studies. Nothing requires studying bands one at a time. NTIA and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can prioritize feasibility studies across several bands at once.
Funding must first clear several hurdles—a pipeline plan identifying bands for potential repurposing, Technical Panel review, OMB approval, and a 60-day congressional-notification period. Streamlining that sequence and using existing agency appropriations for early feasibility work where possible would let studies start sooner and proceed together. Those studies should assess different ways to divide and use each band, giving regulators a fuller picture of their options.
Second, give the deadlines some teeth. Study timelines too often slip or remain open-ended. With OMB and White House backing, NTIA should set a firm delivery date for every study, publish progress updates against that deadline, and specify what happens when a deadline passes. That could mean deciding reallocation based on the existing record or referring unresolved disputes to higher-level officials. The rule should apply regardless of SRF funding. Deadlines cannot prevent political overrides, as Ligado showed, but they can keep the technical phase from becoming open-ended.
Finally, give FCC engineers with security clearances fuller access to the evidence. Many bands under review support classified operations, which complicates information-sharing. Existing channels reflect years of work to manage that problem, including the FCC’s liaison role in the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee, the Interagency Spectrum Advisory Council, and coordination commitments in the agencies’ updated memorandum of understanding. Even so, the FCC can still lack a complete picture of the federal operations at stake.
Consistent with national security, NTIA should require incumbents to identify the specific systems and receivers at risk and share their analytical models. Studies should assess the likelihood and severity of interference, rather than default to worst-case assumptions. That would give the FCC the evidence it needs to evaluate the findings.
Wider access creates operational risks for incumbents. Building on existing safeguards, NTIA can contain those risks by limiting access to a small group of cleared FCC engineers under defined handling procedures. Protecting sensitive information and giving regulators enough evidence to make informed decisions are both achievable.
Time to Clear the Air
Opening more mid-band spectrum to commercial use will remain a central challenge for the executive branch. More radios mean greater potential for harmful interference, but the networks they support are vital to U.S. economic security. Some reallocation and sharing proposals will prove unworkable. Timely, reliable evidence should determine which ones.
Ligado’s experience shows why NTIA cannot leave the pace to incumbents that benefit from delay. The agency must keep studies moving and ensure decision-makers can securely access accurate information about federal operations. National security deserves rigorous analysis. It does not require an indefinite extension.
