Apparently, I missed that discussion. Anyway.


There are a few fundamental problems about ubiquitous wi-fi.

1) Practical: it's not regulated (the 2.4GHz band is full already), nobody can prevent 5 of your neighbours to use the available spectrum for their home routers.

2) Economical: deploying a network is expensive. Yet, the main drive behind wi-fi is price, how is that going to be financed?

3) Technical: wifi is designed to work on a home router. There is no handover and no identification protocol. Try having one client very close and one at the limit of coverage and it breaks. It's not designed for phoning: try having two sip conversation on the same cell and one is going to suffer.


And since this is about cellphone carriers: the only reason wifi exists (beyond home networking) is carriers greed. If you had a reasonable 3G data plan, you would not even consider using wifi. You would have ubiquitous broadband coverage that actually works.