America’s infrastructure needs a serious upgrade. That includes the nation’s digital infrastructure — the critical networks underpinning commerce, defense, transport, and public safety. It sustains innovation power — the ability to invent, adapt, and adopt new technologies — integral to our competitiveness and national security in the 21st century.

This nation has been the pacesetter of the digital era, with a sequence of game-changing innovations in cellular technology: 2G brought text; 3G brought mobile broadband and BlackBerry; 4G brought mobile video and the app stores. But now we are far behind in technologies like 5G, with less than half the speed of Bulgaria or Malaysia, and just 7% of South’s Korea’s number of 5G base stations per capita. While the Chinese technology firm Huawei’s global market dominance in 5G has been slowed somewhat by sanctions and export controls, it is not threatened by superior U.S. innovations.

Now, with the release of the first-ever National Spectrum Strategy, the Biden administration has shown it is taking America’s waning digital infrastructure seriously. The strategy — along with the broadband investments of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act’s industrial policy — recognizes that telecommunications policy and infrastructure are critical for preserving American technology leadership. But despite these advances, our approach to spectrum innovation isn’t sufficient.