Take a look around at the next ball game or concert you attend. You’ll see thousands of fans sending text messages or snapping photos and e-mailing them to friends. Those armies of smartphone owners are behind a striking increase in wireless data usage: Cisco estimates that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 18 by 2016, and Bell Labs predicts it will increase by a factor of 25.

With traffic growing so rapidly, is wireless spectrum likely to run out?…“We don’t have a spectrum crunch so much as we have a spectrum policy crunch,” says David Tennenhouse, Microsoft’s vice president of technology policy and a former MIT professor and Intel executive. “The so-called ‘spectrum crunch’ really reflects artificial spectrum scarcity,” he says. [Read More]