WBA Celebrates Saudi Arabia’s Groundbreaking Designation for Unlicensed Spectrum

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA), the body leading development of next-generation Wi-Fi services, commends the the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) for their groundbreaking spectrum designation of the entire 6 GHz band (5.925-7.125 GHz) for license-exempt use.

Saudi Arabia is the first country in the Middle East, Europe, or Africa to designate all 1200 MHz of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use. The Kingdom now has more than 2 GHz of spectrum for Wi-Fi operations – the most mid-band spectrum designated by any country globally. 

The Kingdom made this decision after a comprehensive consultation, significant engagement with various global stakeholders, and trials with Wi-Fi 6E equipment furnished by WBA members Broadcom Inc. and Intel Corporation. The trials demonstrated that the Kingdom could advance its digital ambitions, achieving 2 Gigabits per second speed in laptop computers, while enabling continued operations with existing users of the 6 GHz band.  

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Kingdom’s decision for digitizing its economy and enabling next-generation services. In WBA’s annual report, members of the Wi-Fi industry said that the 6 GHz band is a critical component of their network strategy, with 78% seeking to take advantage of this spectrum to deliver high speed wireless broadband. By making all 1200 MHz of the band available, the Saudi’s have created a wireless superhighway with seven non-overlapping 160 MHz channels of green field spectrum for Wi-Fi 6E devices to use. Saudis will enjoy high reliability Wi-Fi that doubles the speeds and halves the latency compared to the capacity-constrained 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.    

The Kingdom will also be well positioned to lead in Wi-Fi 7 deployments when it becomes available. With this broad-based designation, Wi-Fi 7 deployments using 320 MHz wide channels will get up to 5 gigabits per second in mobile devices at very low latencies. This sets the stage for the Kingdom to further reap the benefits of contextual Internet, integrated communications services, and immersive AR/VR for telemedicine, education and worker training.