Now up the carrier frequencies a few orders of magnitude then yes, you’ve got the bandwidth to do it. But those frequencies just happen to be in the optical range. There’s a technological reason urban connectivity is evolving to optical.

The appetite for bandwidth is insatiable. For wireless to displace wired for “last mile” connectivity (the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer), wireless has to offer more bandwidth for the buck than wired technology.

In sparsely-populated rural areas, wireless will probably be more cost effective. (In fact, we’d already HAVE high-speed wireless Internet access in rural areas if Congress hadn’t foolishly intruded into the marketplace by forcing the telecoms to deploy—at a loss—wired Internet infrastructure in rural areas and using their urban customer base to subsidize it.)

But in population-dense urban areas? Verizon hasn’t spent millions (if not billions) building their FIOS infrastructure because they expect wired technology to shrivel up and die within the next few years, for example.

And furthermore, the technology that carries Internet packets around the country and around the world is all wired (fiberoptic cables, including dozens and dozens of trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific undersea cables).