It's spectrum licensing that's obsolete. We know how to make smart radios. It's time to enable people to use as much spectrum as they need, not as much as we are willing to pay to rent.
I agree and disagree. Licensing is obsolete for a lot of cases. At the same time, smart radio technology isn't there yet. In fact, this article is a great example of that. Both WiFi and LTE have pretty primitive spectrum sharing technology built in. But it doesn't work that well together.
I worked on spectrum sharing technology as part of the DARPA XG project about 10 years ago. It worked great for many things and had some significant limitations. Not to mention, the necessary hardware is still very expensive (high bandwidth analog frontends, extremely sensitive detectors, substantial CPU and memory to run the algorithms). The simplified version of that sort of technology you have in LTE on unlicensed band is probably the best you can do without blowing your budget. And that's not good enough to replace licensing. The challenge is probably a bit but not tremendously simpler than self-driving cars, and the relevant cost, size, and power budgets are a couple of orders of magnitude tighter.
Besides that, the ideal of smart radios interacting in a totally unregulated world is suboptimal. As Bill Lehr points out, smart radios work way better when you impose certain rules on everyone. See also Kevin Werbach's work on the subject: http://werbach.com/research/supercommons.pdf. The unlicensed band for example isn't totally unregulated. You have strict power output limitations. But that's sub-optimal. If you're a WiFi access point in the country, you can probably use a lot more power without causing interference. At the same time, you don't want to create a shouting match scenario, where each node ups their power output to drown out the others. More sophisticated rules help you get more efficient use of your unlicensed band. For example, you can mandate transmission power control (only enough power to close the link) you can mandate the use of FEC, so you don't have dumb devices that can't handle even a tiny bit of interference. Etc.
But you're right about the big picture. Allocating spectrum is not the way forward. We don't "allocate road" to cars--we just define rules they have to follow to play nicely with others on the road. Licensing has its place in enforcing those rules, and doesn't need to imply fixed allocations.
I wouldn't call current wifi smart any more than I'd call the primitive beamforming in wifi "SDMA." I'd also agree that smart radios need to observe some common set of rules, or at least principles, much in the way that self-driving cars need compatible principles of operation.
I am, however, optimistic about cost and timeline. The amount of hair in your mobile phone's radio to make it work on 2G FDMA/TDMA, WCDMA, and OFDMA, and their respective layer 2 protocols, while it certainly adds cost, doesn't add a multiple of cost compared with, say, a pure wimax 2 radio. Making radios that use different technologies smart enough to share spectrum is a relatively cleaner and less compute-intensive problem. I think it could be done now, and a really huge amount of spectrum could be made available for use cases similar to today's wifi right now.
