And many countries allow competition in cellular telephony.
The result would be a new type of hand-held device blending aspects of network computing and traditional cellular telephony.
Cellular telephony has gone from nothing to 3.7m users.Yet telecoms still demand vast investment.
Marty Cooper, ArrayComm's chief executive, who pioneered cellular telephony at Motorola, smells a rat.
So, in 1988, Dr Jacobs decided to apply it to terrestrial cellular telephony instead.
Millions in Africa have simply bypassed traditional infrastructure stages such as landlines and branch banking, skipping straight to cellular telephony and mobile money.
The UHF band also is used for studio and remote-pickup television relays, microwave line-of-sight links (1.7 2.3 gigahertz), and cellular telephony (806 890 megahertz).
ITS America, a trade association that promotes wider adoption of the systems, sees great promise in marrying the technology with cellular telephony, according to Paul Najarian, the group's telecommunications director.
There are now about 40 million Wi-Fi users, he said, and new access points are selling at the rate of about 15,000 a day, which makes Wi-Fi a much faster-growing technology than cellular telephony.
In an industry where lack of spectrum imposes an enormous barrier to entry, cellular telephony in the United States could become an anticompetitive duopoly.
As fancy phones proliferate at the expense of basic ones smartphone subscriptions will surge by 20%, to 2.4bn mobile-internet use will rival traditional cellular telephony.
