A big reason our wireless infrastructure sucks (and won't improve a whole lot) is that we devote a huge amount of the best spectrum space to broadcast radio and television. Signals sent on TV or radio-sized frequency travel farther and are less vulnerable to interference than cell phone signals or LTE just about anything else except for some channels reserved for military communication. We have the ability to send a whole lot of data over the air more robustly than we can right now, but it's being used to support obsolete technology.

The FCC auctioned off or gave away a lot of prime spectrum to radio and TV providers back when it wasn't nearly as precious as it is today, and they adopted old, inefficient formats that need an enormous range of frequencies to transmit very little data. Do you know anyone who has used broadcast television over the past ten years? I don't, and I don't think I know very many people who have either. Yet we still use a whole lot of really good VHF space for wasteful analog communication. Meanwhile, the channels used for some of the most important things, like Wi-Fi, need to use some of the crappiest spectrum around, because everything else has been allocated already.

Things are improving, albeit slowly. The switch from analog to digital broadcast TV is opening up a whole lot of space, much of which is being used for WIMAX. But radio uses up even more space than TV did, and there are no plans on the horizon to change it at all.