The FCC Has an Opportunity to Prepare the Internet for AI

H ere’s the bad news: Today’s broadband ecosystem is not ready for artificial intelligence. The sheer amount of data handled and moved by AI is already crowding America’s bandwidth.  Without infrastructure upgrades to keep up with the ever-accelerating AI boom, consumers’ communications services will decay. The challenge for America’s politicians is to accelerate the modernization of America’s telecommunications networks so they can reliably support the AI revolution.

Now, the good news: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon decide how to let private companies rise to the occasion. This Thursday, the commissioners will vote to streamline federal rules governing how companies upgrade their networks.

This regulatory relief is coming in the nick of time. Industry research finds that as much as 74 percent of new webpages in April 2025 featured AI-generated or assisted content, including blogs, social media posts, and white papers. Meanwhile, internet traffic forecasts predict that AI will drive up consumer network traffic as much as six to nine times by 2033, reaching 1,135 exabytes per month. AI isn’t hypothetical anymore — it’s actively changing the internet landscape.

On the wireless side of broadband, consumers will likely experience slower speeds and degraded quality as spectrum airwaves fill up. Research from Accenture predicts that the U.S. will experience a shortage of around 1400 megahertz (MHz) by 2032, affecting consumers through lost productivity at work, degraded connection quality for entertainment, and worsened connection to telehealth and emergency services.

It doesn’t have to be this way. American politicians at the state and federal levels should include more spectrum for wireless communications, accelerate copper retirement, and facilitate the buildout of modern wireline connectivity.

Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act directed the FCC — with the help of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — to identify 800 new MHz for commercial use and reauthorized the FCC to issue licenses to these new airwaves through auctions. With more bandwidth available, wireless communications technology can scale to meet the growing data traffic surge, but the federal government must not stop there. Congress’s 800 MHz offering is not enough to cover the full 1400 MHz shortage. To fully address the issue, they’ll need follow-up legislation.

Some politicians have already gotten the memo — and they have responded with a vision of American leadership. In a recent speech at the State of the Net conference, FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty highlighted the FCC’s responsibility to “make more spectrum available to innovators and developers,” and support allocations that maximize its best uses. Commissioner Trusty’s bullseye of a speech charts a promising course for the FCC.

But to actually solve the problem, the FCC must be given more bandwidth to allocate. That is why Congress must pass follow-up legislation to add at least 600 additional MHz to the spectrum pipeline for the FCC to reallocate, with a portion set aside for unlicensed uses like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.

Meanwhile, advanced AI traffic often runs on outmoded copper wiring that serves just over one in five consumers, which is too slow to meet minimal federal benchmarks, and actually costs consumers more than higher-tech alternatives. Shoddy copper wiring — often subject to theft and natural disaster interruption — will increasingly hold dependent consumers back while their higher-tech peers enjoy the full benefits of AI and the internet in the coming years. Replacing yesteryear’s copper infrastructure with high-speed, reliable networks capable of moving large amounts of data can create a broadband ecosystem where the benefits of AI can be widely diffused to all American consumers.

That’s why the FCC is voting to streamline rules for copper wire retirement procedures. Simpler rules for maintaining connectivity while replacing outdated copper free up capital for private companies to deploy faster, more capable tech to unserved and underserved areas.

Without the right policy steps, regulatory roadblocks that have kept copper in use will remain in place, and AI-driven increases in data traffic will outpace ongoing upgrade efforts. To preserve consumers’ connectivity, improve it, and deliver it to unserved and underserved communities, these roadblocks must be addressed through streamlined rules for wired upgrades and increasing the spectrum supply for wireless communications.