Re:Regulation inevitable (Score 1)

You have a point in terms of reliability, but one of the problems however is the current level of clutter in the RF spectrum, there simply aren't that many uncluttered bands which could be licensed, even then the cost would be huge. Consequently, one of the main thrusts in wireless these days is spectral efficiency (getting the highest data rate per unit frequency consumed), and improved architectures and algorithms (e.g. mimo and turbo codes) are coming out steadily. Regulation, on the other hand, does not promote spectral efficiency, e.g. FM radio is one of the worst culprits as each station consumes 200kHz of spectrum to provide a simple FM voice signal. My point is that from a research perspective the long term benefits of experimental systems operating in unlicensed bands should not be ignored for the sake of doing things by classical, less efficient methods.