Whooooooooops Our Infrastructure!

CNN Money—Sorry, America: Your wireless airwaves are full:

The U.S. mobile phone industry is running out of the airwaves necessary to provide voice, text and Internet services to its customers.

The problem, known as the "spectrum crunch," threatens to increase the number of dropped calls, slow down data speeds and raise customers' prices for cell phone service. It will also whittle down the nation's number of wireless carriers and create a deeper financial schism between those companies that have capacity and those that don't.

There are potential solutions, but none are inexpensive, easy to implement, or catch-all. And no major fixes are on the horizon.

The U.S. still has a slight spectrum surplus at the moment. But at our current growth rate, that surplus turns into a deficit as early as next year, according to the Federal Communications Commission's estimates.

There are a lot of reasons offered in the article about how we got here, but the reason we got here is because, in the Information Age, the US has decided that information, like healthcare and everything else, is a privilege, not a right, that should be managed primarily as a for-profit enterprise—so the US government has not assumed enough control of the business to justify expanding the infrastructure. That's left to the corporations, who don't give a fuck how they make their money, and they're quite happy to keep raising prices and price out more consumers to narrow the user base and decrease the tax on aging infrastructure, rather than invest profits they could otherwise profit in infrastructure to keep prices low for greater participation.

The market may solve the problem, but it solves the problem for the profiteers, not the end users.