This may be an incredibly naive question, but is there any reason wireless communication isn't directional, to mitigate some of these interference and square of distance problems? You'd obviously need some lower-bandwidth isotropic mechanism to locate other devices, and then a number of heuristics to track and predict motion.<p>Perhaps this is already how these things work?
We are just now tapping on the spatial dimension of wireless channels; up to now we have just used frequency, time, and polarization for orthogonality. Spatial processing allows theoretically unlimited (bounded by computation, solved by Moore) channel capacity. At the same time, we are beginning to use the available channel resources more efficiently with cognitive radios, which allows much better spectrum utilization. Today, with statically allocated spectrum use, I'd guess that less than 10% of allocated spectrum and time is in active use at any time.
My first thought before even reading the article was: <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bufferbloat.net/</a><p>Good to see someone else commented about it.