Last October the FCC issued a Notice for Proposed Rulemaking that proposed expanding WiFi into the 6 GHz band of spectrum (5.925 to 7.125 GHz). WiFi has been a huge economic boon to the country, and the FCC recognizes that providing more free public spectrum is a vital piece of the spectrum puzzle. Entrepreneurs have found a myriad of inventive ways to use WiFi that go far beyond what carriers have provided with licensed spectrum.

In much of the country the 6 GHz spectrum is likely to be limited to indoor usage due to possible outdoor interference with Broadcast Auxiliary Service, where remote crews transmit news feeds to radio and TV stations, and Cable Television Relay Service, which cable companies used to transmit data within a cable company. The biggest future needs for WiFi are going to be indoors, so restricting this spectrum to indoor use doesn’t feel like an unreasonable limitation.

However, WiFi has some inherent limitations. The biggest problem with the WiFi standard is that a WiFi network will pause to allow any user to use the bandwidth. In a crowded environment with a lot of devices, the constant pausing adds latency and delay in the system, and in heavy-use environments like a business hotel the constant pauses can nearly shut down a WiFi network. Most of us don’t feel that interference today inside our homes, but as we add more and more devices over time, we will recognize the inherent WiFi interference into our network. The place where WiFi interference is already a big concern is in heavy wireless environments like hospitals, factories, airports, business hotels, and convention centers.

Many of our future computing needs are going to require low latency. For instance, creating home holograms from multiple transmitters is going to require timely delivery of packets to each transmitter. Using augmented reality to assist in surgery will require delivery of images in real-time. WiFi promises to get better with the introduction of WiFi 6 using the 802.11ax standard, but that new standard does not eliminate the innate limitations of WiFi.

The good news is that we already have a new wireless standard that can create low-latency dedicated signal paths to users. Fully implemented 5G with frequency slicing can be used to satisfy those situations where WiFi doesn’t meet the need. It’s not hard to picture a future indoor network where a single router can satisfy some user needs using the WiFi standard with other uses satisfied using 5G—the router will choose the best standard to use for a given need.

To some degrees, the cellular carriers have this same vision. They talk of 5G being used to take over IoT needs instead of WiFi. They talk about using 5G for low latency uses like augmented reality. But when comparing the history of the cellular networks and WiFi, it’s clear that WiFi has been used far more creatively. There are thousands of vendors working in today’s limited WiFi spectrum that have developed a wide array of wireless services. Comparatively, the cellular carriers have been quite vanilla in their use of cellular networks to deliver voice and data.

I have no doubt that AT&T and Verizon have plans to offer million-dollar 5G solutions for smart factories, hospitals, airports and other busy wireless environments. But in doing so, they will tap only a tiny fraction of the capability of 5G. If we want 5G actually to meet the high expectations that the industry has established, we ought to create a public swath of spectrum that can use 5G. The FCC could easily empower the use of the 6 GHz spectrum for both WiFi and 5G, and in doing so would unleash wireless entrepreneurs to come up with technologies that haven’t even been imagined.

The current vision of the cellular carriers is to somehow charge everybody a monthly subscription to use 5G—and there will be enough devices using the spectrum that most people will eventually give in and buy the subscription. However, the big carriers are not going to be particularly creative, and instead, are likely to be very restrictive on how we use 5G.

The alternate vision is to set aside a decent slice of public spectrum for indoor use of 5G. The public will gain use of the spectrum by buying a 5G router, with no monthly subscription fee—because it’s using public spectrum. After all, 5G is a just standard, developed worldwide and is not the proprietary property of the big cellular companies. Entrepreneurs will jump on the opportunity to develop great uses for the spectrum and the 5G standard. Rather than being held captive by the limited vision of AT&T and Verizon we’d see a huge number of devices using 5G creatively. This could truly unleash things like augmented reality and virtual presence. Specialty vendors would develop applications that make great strides in hospital health care. We’d finally see smart shopping holograms in stores.

The public probably doesn’t understand that the FCC has complete authority over how each swath of spectrum is used. Only the FCC can determine which spectrum can or cannot be used for WiFi, 5G and other standards. The choice ought to be an easy one. The FCC can let a handful of cellular companies decide how society will use 5G, or they can unleash the creativity of thousands of developers to come up with a myriad of 5G applications. We know that creating public spectrum creates immense societal and economic good. If the FCC hadn’t set aside public spectrum for WiFi, we’d all still have wires to all our home broadband devices, and many of the things we now take for granted would never have come to pass.