In 2026, 98% of US phones in use can join a Wi-Fi DAS for data, and 88% can carry voice

In 2026, 98% of US phones in use are ready for data over a Wi-Fi DAS, and 88% for voice.^1,2 A Wi-Fi DAS is venue Wi-Fi used like a cellular distributed antenna system (DAS): phones join it through Passpoint, the Wi-Fi Alliance standard for automatic network sign-in, and make calls over it with Wi-Fi Calling.

The model weights 100 US handsets from 2010 to 2026 by how many were sold and by how long phones stay in use. Data readiness means the phone’s operating system can join a Passpoint network; it was 50% in 2015 and 92% in 2021.¹ Voice readiness means the carrier has enabled Wi-Fi Calling on the SKU (model variant) it sells; it was 0% before 2016 and 72% in 2020.²

In 2026, 88% of phones in use are ready for both and 2% for neither.³

A legacy cellular DAS still serves these phones, at a narrowing share of their spectrum. The comparison is a neutral-host DAS (one shared by several carriers) built at the 2011 LTE rollout[S1] and upgraded at the typical venue pace (Track B). In every year, 97–100% of phones in use attach to it and get voice and data through it.¹

The share of the phones’ usable spectrum this plant (the installed DAS hardware) passes, its spectrum match, narrows from 96–100% through 2017 to 79–85% from 2021 to 2026 (81% in 2026).¹ By 2026 a never-upgraded 2011 plant (Track A) passes 18% of that spectrum, and an actively maintained one (Track C) passes 98%.¹

Data readiness overtook the Track B spectrum match in 2020, and voice readiness overtook it in 2024 (see the crossover section). The data crossing falls in 2019–2021 in every sensitivity case; the voice crossing falls in 2021–2025 in the market-weighted cases and does not occur if the 100 phones are weighted equally (see Sensitivity).⁴

The two readiness numbers come from different layers. Data readiness is operating-system capability, which is measured; whether a venue has enabled Passpoint cannot be observed. Voice readiness is carrier enablement, documented per device on carrier and phone-maker (OEM) support pages.

The voice gap comes from carrier policy rather than hardware. Of the 12 cohort devices released after 2016 that fail the voice test, 4 Motorola phones lack a Wi-Fi Calling listing at a carrier that whitelists its own builds (AT&T, formerly Sprint), and 2 of them lack one elsewhere too. Of the other 8, 5 lack only a T-Mobile or a Verizon listing, 2 have no listing at any carrier, and the LG Stylo 4 has one only at T-Mobile.²

Phone turnover is closing the voice gap. Every device in the cohort released from 2016 onward is ready for data, and voice readiness rises with recency: in 2026, 95% of phones two years old or newer are ready for both, against 79% of older phones.³ With US handset lives of 3–4 years, the voice gap sits in older phones and narrows as they are replaced.

For a venue in 2026, the two systems complement each other. A Wi-Fi DAS can carry data and voice for the phones counted above as ready. The legacy cellular DAS carries voice for most of the 12% of phones not ready for Wi-Fi Calling (11 percentage points) and legacy-band data for 99% of phones, at four-fifths of the spectrum modern phones are built for.

Together the two give 99% of phones a voice path and 99% a data path; the rest are phones without LTE or 5G, released 2009–2013.³

For each year from 2011 to 2026, what share of US phones in use is ready for a Wi-Fi DAS, with data through Passpoint and voice through Wi-Fi Calling? How does that compare with how well installed legacy cellular DAS plants, under realistic upgrade behavior, match the bands the same phones are built for, and where do the curves cross?

Four rules apply throughout:

• Per-band splits are never collapsed: B12, B13 and B17 stay separate, as do B4, the AWS-3 paired blocks and full B66, and LTE B41 and 5G New Radio (NR) n41.
• A DAS passes spectrum whatever technology the carrier runs in it.
• Where sources disagree, both readings are recorded, and no disagreement is resolved silently.
• Every fact carries a source link.

Source tiers. Sources fall into three tiers. Tier 1 is the manufacturer’s, carrier’s or regulator’s own record, such as spec and support pages and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) grants; Tier 2 a secondary specification database (GSMArena, frequencycheck); Tier 3 market research, analyst estimates and community reports.

Handset cohort. The cohort is 100 devices, each taken in its US variant (SKU), 20 per era (2010–2012, 2013–2015, 2016–2019, 2020–2023, 2024–2026). They were selected from comScore and Kantar US best-seller lists and Counterpoint global best-seller lists where available, and by archetype (flagship, mid-range, prepaid) otherwise, as recorded per device in the handset selection list.

Bands for each US SKU come from GSMArena’s per-variant lines, Apple tech-spec pages for iPhones, and frequencycheck per-model pages where GSMArena merges variants. FCC equipment-authorization grants were checked in quality assurance: 84 of 100 devices carry a confirmed FCC ID and 11 a probable one, and for the other 5 no FCC ID was found.⁵ Seven band flags were changed where an FCC grant contradicted the Tier 2 value; the seven are listed under Band flags changed to match FCC grants on the References page.

DAS capability. The DAS capability timeline, charted on the DAS systems page, gives, for each year and each of three tracks, the bands a plant passes and the technologies the carriers still transmit:⁶

• Track A: never upgraded.
• Track B: a typical venue, with a 2–3 year lag for module adds and 3–5 years, or a forklift upgrade (replacement of the plant), for spectrum outside the passband. The lags are calibrated on FirstNet B14 (the US public-safety band) and C-band.
• Track C: actively maintained, at the vendors’ state of the art plus one procurement cycle.

Track B and Track C dates were reset in September 2026 against 321 dated vendor rows for Corning/MobileAccess, CommScope/Andrew, TE/ADC FlexWave, SOLiD, ADRF and JMA/Teko. Of the 321, 311 are archived vendor documents (Wayback Machine captures) or FCC grants and filings, and 10 are live vendor or distributor documents or archive index searches.⁷ The rows are listed on the DAS systems page, and the timeline rows that rest on them (Track B 2016–2026, Track C 2013–2020 and 2023–2024) are tagged [E] in the timeline data.

Scoring rule. Each device is placed, for each year and track, in one of five service states:

• Native: the device has at least one usable LTE or 5G NR band on the plant, and every band in its preferred capacity layer (its n77, n41/B41, n71/B71, B66, B30 and B14, as present) is fully passed.
• Partial: at least one preferred layer is passed or partially passed.
• Degraded: the device has a usable LTE or NR band on the plant (usable means fully passed) but none of its preferred layers.
• 3G/voice fallback: the device has no usable LTE or NR band, has 3G, and 3G is still transmitted (per the timeline’s list of technologies the carriers still transmit; 3G ends in 2022[S25]).
• Unserved: none of the above.

NR on n2, n5, n25, n41, n66 and n71 counts as passed when the plant passes the same-numbered LTE band, because NR inside the passband rides the LTE passband. This covers dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) and refarming (spectrum reassigned to a new use, here from LTE to NR). A 2011-era LTE phone whose bands are the plant’s bands scores native.

“AWS-3 paired blocks” passes B4 fully and B66 partially, and “B14 (passive-only)” counts as partial. Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum is excluded from the preferred set as a small-cell layer, which venues do not expect a DAS to carry.

Spectrum-match index (headline DAS metric). For each device, year and track, the index is the share of the device’s US downlink spectrum that the plant passes, with each band weighted by its downlink width as set by 3GPP, the mobile standards body[S42; S43]. The population value is the mean over LTE- or NR-capable devices that support at least one band in the table below, each weighted by its market weight and survival (see Weighting phones in use).

Counting rules:

• Supersets are counted once: B25 contains B2, B26 contains B5, B12 contains B17, and B66 contains B4.
• LTE and NR on the same band are one block.
• A partially passed band counts half, and “AWS-3 paired blocks” pass 70 of B66’s 90 MHz.
• CBRS (B48) is excluded as a small-cell layer, as in the scoring rule.

Band width is a proxy for capacity: carriers load their layers unequally (T-Mobile on n41, Verizon and AT&T on n77[S45]), and “passes” still assumes the carrier feeds the band. Served means the device attaches and gets service on at least one live band (native, partial, degraded or 3G/voice fallback).

Weighting phones in use. A device enters the population in its release year with a market weight and decays with an exponential survival curve of mean life 3.5 years (swept 3 and 5).⁸ The market weight is the device’s estimated share of US smartphone sales in its launch window (the twelve months from release), scaled so the mean weight within each era is 1. The weight is constant across years, so the survival curve alone does the aging.⁹

Weights come from a four-level hierarchy, best available evidence first:

1. a published US all-market sales share for the model inside its launch window (35 devices: Counterpoint US top-5 and top-10, Kantar);
2. a US share carried from within two years, or a DeviceAtlas US traffic share converted to sales (2 devices);
3. a within-OEM model-mix share multiplied by the OEM’s US share (13 devices);
4. the OEM’s US share split equally across the OEM’s cohort devices in that era (50 devices).

The first three levels carry 69% of total weight, and 74–89% of each era’s weight from 2016 onward. All weight evidence is Tier 3 and changes weights only, never a device fact. The equal-weights-within-era case and the OEM-share-only alternative are kept as sensitivity cases, called the equal-weights and OEM-share scenarios (see Sensitivity).

Wi-Fi DAS: ready to carry voice (Wi-Fi Calling). For each of the 100 devices, Wi-Fi Calling enablement was established per US carrier from Tier 1 sources:

• for iPhones, Apple’s per-carrier US feature page;
• for Android, carrier per-device support pages (Verizon knowledge base, AT&T device-support capability records, T-Mobile device pages) and OEM articles (Google Pixel Help, Motorola carrier-compatibility articles);
• dated carrier launch statements: T-Mobile Un-carrier 7.0, September 2014; Sprint, April 2014; AT&T, October 2015 for iPhone and 2016 for Android; Verizon, December 2015 for the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, and 2016 for other devices.

A device counts as voice-ready when every carrier its SKU is sold for lists it: a single carrier for a carrier build, and all three national carriers for unlocked or multi-carrier SKUs and iPhones. Support is dated from the later of device release and carrier launch, with the first archived capture kept as an upper bound.

Where a carrier cell was blank, community reports (Tier 3) together with the carrier’s dated blanket statement could lift it to “probable”, never “confirmed” (two cells, both on T-Mobile). Coverage: 88 of 100 devices confirmed, 8 probable, 4 not found (the Wi-Fi Calling support dataset).

Wi-Fi DAS: ready for data (Passpoint layers). Four layers are recorded for each handset in the handset dataset; the OS layer is shown in the handset table:

• Silicon: 802.11n or later Wi-Fi (2013 onward).
• OS-capable: iPhone from the later of release and 2013; Android from release if launched on Android 6.0 or later (Passpoint is required from Android 11)[S46], or from one year after release if the capability arrived by update (an assumption).
• Certified: the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA) Product Finder certificate date.
• Enabled: not measurable, so the OS-capable curve is the upper bound and is labeled as such.

Source disagreements. Where sources disagreed, both readings were recorded, and no disagreement was resolved silently. Band flags follow the FCC grant in each settled case where it contradicted a Tier 2 value, real per-SKU differences keep both values, and evidence gaps are stated in Caveats and open items. The questions still open are listed on the References page.

The vendors’ own datasheets and FCC grants date the DAS lag at every handset wave: passive plant was specified 698–2700 MHz until 2018–2020, full B66 modules shipped from 2018 to 2024, and C-band DAS modules from 2021 to 2024.⁷

Passive plant was specified 698–2700 MHz from at least January 2013 through May 2018 (CommScope), 650/690–2700 MHz at ADRF, and 698–2700 MHz on TE’s combiner shelf. That passband already contained FirstNet B14[S42] and the PCS G block[S47], so passive plant carried those refarmed bands with no new hardware. It did not contain B71 (617–698 MHz)[S42] or anything above 2.7 GHz.

Passives reaching below 698 MHz or above 2.7 GHz appear in February 2018 (ADRF, 578–2700 MHz), July 2019 (JMA antennas, 617–4200 MHz) and by January 2020 (CommScope, 555–6000 MHz; its transition falls between May 2018 and January 2020). ADRF’s published passive passbands still stop at 2700 MHz in 2026, but its “-X” wideband splitters and couplers (October 2022) and its n77 diplexer (December 2022) have no published passband.

Active remotes. Vendors added modules for each band in these years:

What this means for the model. Track C adds B41 in 2015, carries AWS-3 paired blocks rather than full B66 until 2019, gains B71 in 2019, and reaches n77 at four of six vendors by 2023 (Corning in May 2024; TE never). Track B carries AWS-3 paired blocks from 2017 to 2020 and full B66 from 2021–2022.⁶

Half of US phones in use carried B12 in 2018 (45% in 2017), B66 in 2019, B71 in 2020, B14 in 2021, and n41 and n77 in 2023. By 2026, B66 is in 94%, B71 in 93% and n77 in 81% of phones in use.¹⁰

Against the vendor dates, full B66 reached a typical venue (Track B) in 2022, three years after half the phones carried it. n77 reached Track B only as “partial / flagship venues” from 2023, and B71/n71 entered Track B in 2021–2022, four to five years after its 2017 launch[S20]. B12, B14 and LTE B41 (whose passband n41 rides) reached Track B before half the phones carried them, so the lag is in full B66, B71/n71 and n77.

Source: the model output, base case.¹

The table supports three readings:

1. Through 2017 a typical plant passes 96–100% of the spectrum its phones can use. The 2011 bands were the phones’ bands, and the 2013–2017 additions (B12, the B25 G block, B41, and AWS-3 paired blocks from 2017) were in-passband or module adds.
2. The decline from 2018 is the handsets outrunning the plant: B71 (launched 2017[S20], in Track B from 2021–2022), the full B66 extensions (vendor state of the art in 2018, Track B in 2022) and n77 (on macro networks in 2022[S48], Track B partial from 2023). The 2021–2022 low (79–80%) is the window between the 5G bands reaching phones and reaching typical plant.
3. Track A shows what never upgrading costs: in 2026 a 2011 plant passes 18% of the usable spectrum of phones in use (less for the newest phones), while still serving them. Track C shows the ceiling: 98% in 2026, with dips to 86–89% only in 2021–2022.

Secondary view: service state on Track B. The binary service states from the scoring rule in Method (native, partial, degraded, 3G/voice fallback, unserved) are kept for completeness. They exaggerate the DAS decline, because a single missing layer (often AT&T’s 10 MHz B30[S6; S42], which Track B never carries) moves a phone from native to partial.

Ready for data (Passpoint). iOS is OS-capable from iOS 7 (2013)[S49; S50], at Passpoint Release 1, where Apple has stayed: 97% of iPhones in use in 2013, 99% in 2015 and 100% from 2019.¹¹ Passpoint arrives on Android with Android 6 (2015) and becomes mandatory in Android 11 (2020)[S46; S51; S52]: 10% of Android phones in use in 2015, 42% in 2017, 83% in 2021 and 96% in 2026.¹

Whether a venue or operator has pushed a Passpoint profile cannot be observed, so these shares are upper bounds. Wi-Fi Alliance certification was checked and set aside as a metric: 7 of the 69 non-Apple devices are Passpoint-certified, all 7 of them Android phones from 2013–2018[S59], and Apple does not certify.¹²

Ready to carry voice (Wi-Fi Calling). Carrier enablement is documented per device, so this layer is measured directly; the Passpoint layer above is an upper bound. On the strict test (every carrier the SKU is sold for), Wi-Fi Calling covers 0% of phones in use before 2016, 47% in 2016, 72% in 2020 and 88% in 2026; on the loose test (any carrier), 96% in 2026.²

Of the 60 cohort devices released from 2016 onward, 58 have a Wi-Fi Calling listing on at least one carrier; the Galaxy A25 5G and the OnePlus 13 have none. The strict shortfall is concentrated in unlocked and retail mid-tier SKUs (Moto G and E series, Galaxy A series, LG Tribute and Stylo, OnePlus) on carriers that whitelist their own builds. In every case found, the carrier-sold sibling SKU of the same phone is enabled.²

Four devices remain unsourced.

Ready for both, by phone age. In 2026, 88% of phones in use are ready for both data and voice over a Wi-Fi DAS: 95% of phones two years old or newer, and 79% of older phones.³

By release year, every device from 2016 onward is ready for data, and 56–100% of each year’s devices are ready for voice (2021: 5 of 9 devices; 2024: 9 of 11; 2025: 5 of 6). These are unweighted device counts.

What the legacy cellular DAS still does for voice. For the 12% of phones without Wi-Fi Calling on their carrier, the legacy cellular DAS remains the native voice path, and it serves most of them (11 percentage points) at legacy-band capacity. Combining the two, 99% of phones in 2026 have a voice path.³

Wi-Fi DAS data readiness overtakes the typical legacy cellular DAS’s spectrum match in 2020 (Passpoint-capable 88% against 86%); across the sensitivity cases, the crossing falls in 2019–2021.^1,4 Voice readiness crosses in 2024 (Wi-Fi Calling 85% against 82%) and stands at 88% against 81% in 2026.²

The voice crossing falls in 2021–2025 in every market-weighted case. It does not occur if the 100 phones are weighted equally (79% against 82% in 2026), because equal weighting gives low-volume unlocked Android SKUs the same footprint as an iPhone (see Sensitivity).⁴

Against a never-upgraded legacy cellular DAS (Track A, 18% spectrum match in 2026), both readiness curves crossed years ago: data in 2017 and voice in 2018. Against an actively maintained one (Track C, 98%), voice readiness has never crossed; data readiness was ahead only in 2021–2022 and is level with it at 98% in 2025–2026.

Stable across cases:

• the data-readiness crossover window, 2019–2021;
• the near-100% served share;
• the 2026 spectrum-match level, 79–83%.

Sensitive to the case:

• the voice-readiness crossover, which exists in every market-weighted case (2021–2025) and not in the equal-weights scenario;
• the depth and timing of the trough (68–81%, lowest year 2022–2026), which moves with the Track B lag.

A venue two years slower than typical sits at 68% in 2024, and one two years faster has no trough and declines gently to 81%.

Weighting moves the two Wi-Fi curves far more than the DAS curve. Market weights lift Passpoint capability from 35% to 50% in 2015, because of Apple’s 36–44% US share[S53; S54] and a cohort with fewer iPhones than Android models.

Market weights also lift Wi-Fi Calling readiness from 79% to 88% in 2026. Every iPhone from the iPhone 6 onward is enabled on all three national carriers, and the low-volume unlocked Android SKUs that fail the strict test (Pixel, OnePlus, retail Moto G) shrink to their real footprint.

Of the three brand-share fills with the largest estimated sales shares, the LG Stylo 4 and the 2021 Moto G Power have no strict Wi-Fi Calling and push the other way; the 2024 Moto G Power 5G is voice-ready. The 88% is conservative with respect to these cells taken together (see Caveats and open items).^4,9

1. Track B has no B30 in any year, because typical venues skipped the 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band (see the B30 row under Track B in the DAS capability timeline). B30 is 10 MHz of AT&T-only spectrum[S6; S42], so it costs about 1.2–1.3 points of spectrum match in 2026, but it is what moves iPhone 6s/7- and Galaxy S7-class devices from “native” to “partial” in the secondary view from 2016. Adding B30 to Track B was considered and not applied.

2. Market weights are Tier 3 estimates, and half the devices carry a brand-share fill. Per-model US sales shares are published only for the top sellers (Counterpoint US top-5 and top-10 monthly and quarterly tables[S55; S56], Kantar[S57]). As a result, 35 devices have a direct launch-window reading, 2 a carried or traffic-converted one, 13 a model-mix chain, and 50 an OEM-share fill split equally across the OEM’s cohort devices in that era.

   The weakest cells:

   • A brand with only one or two cohort devices in an era hands them its entire share. The cells most likely to be wrong are the LG Stylo 4 (an estimated 14.8% of US sales in its launch window), the 2024 Moto G Power 5G (11.3%) and the 2021 Moto G Power (8.8%). So are the LG Optimus S (7.1%) and the two BlackBerrys (8.0% each), and all are flagged in the market-weight dataset.
   • Pre-2011 launch windows are unobservable: the iPhone 3GS is understated, and the iPhone 4 GSM/CDMA split is 50/50 by assumption.
   • The Galaxy S6 rests on a launch-quarter Kantar reading that is a floor.
   • The DeviceAtlas traffic-to-sales constant spans 1.3–6.3 and affects two devices.
   • Brand-share denominators mix Kantar and NPD sales shares[S57; S58] with comScore subscriber shares[S53; S54].
   • 43 of the 100 cohort rows are archetype fills rather than cited best-sellers (the handset selection list).

   The equal-weights and OEM-share scenarios bracket the effect (see Sensitivity): 79–88% voice-ready in 2026, a data crossover in 2020–2021, and a voice crossover in 2024–2025 or none.

3. Nine band-flag adjudications remain open (the author’s quality-check summary, not published; also listed under Questions still open on the References page): S24 base n77, A16 5G B14/n77, Galaxy J3 B30, A10e B14/B30, S7 B13/B17, Pixel 3 B30, Moto G3 700 MHz, iPhone 6 Plus B13, Prevail 2G. None moves the crossover year.

4. FCC grant dates from grantee listings are upper bounds on first appearance. Two Corning FCC-row passband cells are envelopes: one spans a 3550–3700 MHz CBRS hole, and one includes an edge granted after the row’s snapshot date. FCC-row edges are transmit ranges, not combined downlink and uplink envelopes.

5. Scoring assumes the carrier feeds every band the DAS passes. A plant passing B5 Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) 3G service after 2022 is passing dead air, and it is scored that way through the timeline’s record of which technologies carriers still transmit.

6. Passpoint enablement is unmeasured; the OS-capable (data) curve is an upper bound on what a venue could enable.

7. Each Wi-Fi Calling date is a range with a floor and a ceiling. Carrier support pages were often first archived years after the device shipped (T-Mobile’s bulk crawl of February 2020, Verizon’s 2020–2021 archive floor, AT&T’s sparse archive). Support is therefore dated from the later of release and carrier launch, with the first archived capture kept as an upper bound.

   Two cells rest on community reports plus a carrier blanket statement (Tier 3, marked probable). Four devices are unsourced and count as not voice-ready, so the 2026 voice-ready share, 88% of phones in use, is a floor.

The 100 handsets, with their bands and sources, are on the Handsets studied page. The DAS capability timeline and the 321 dated vendor evidence rows are on the DAS systems studied page. The References page lists the timeline sources and the 631 URLs cited in the data, and holds the CSV downloads.