What is the Global Value of Wi-Fi? How Much More Would be Added by Additional Spectrum?

Each household globally already using Wi-Fi may derive a yearly benefit from Wi-Fi of $118 to $225 resulting in a total economic gain for all households of around $52 billion to $99 billion annually, a study commissioned by Microsoft suggests. 

In the absence of Wi-Fi, mobile operators would be forced to invest large sums in their 
networks or strictly curtail their users’ usage. 

Worldwide, approximately 150,000 to 450,000 new radio base stations would be needed to cope with world smartphone traffic in the absence of Wi-Fi. 

That suggests a savings of about $30 billion to $93 billion in a single year, given current rates of tower construction. 

A 40% yearly growth of data traffic to 2016 will require mobile operators to deploy an 
additional 115,000 extra sites, an increase of around 4% from today’s numbers. However, in 
the absence of Wi-Fi an additional 1.4 million macrocell sites, or 43% of the current total 
would be required. The difference in costs between the two scenarios is extremely large, 
$250 billion (NPV) – comparable to around one third of the total annual revenue of the 
telecommunications industry. Even the least expensive solutions involving femtocells or 

picocells would require an investment of $45 - $60 billion. 

Perhaps that is one way of illustrating the potential value of more extensive use of unlicensed spectrum. 

Many would argue that more spectrum--often licensed spectrum, but perhaps more crucially additional non-licensed spectrum--is needed to spur additional competition in the broadband access market (though some would argue competition in not everywhere the key problem at the moment).

In the case of smartphones and tablets, Wi-Fi carries 69 percent of total traffic. For 
traditional PCs and laptops, Wi-Fi is responsible for carrying 57 percent of total traffic, greater 
than the share of Ethernet connections and 3G data combined. 

Some 439 million households – 25 percent of all households worldwide – have home Wi-Fi networks. 

Without Wi-Fi the value of fixed broadband would be lower and would result in the disconnection of perhaps 50 to 114 million fixed broadband connections around the world.