Robert Crandall and Hal Singer just published this good Wall Street Journal oped on wireless and Net neutrality. It’s great on the economics and historical perspective but misses a key technology issue.

Unlike DSL and fiber optics, wireless is a shared platform. On a mass market scale, its top speed now is around 1.5 MB per second depending on the technology. So if you assume that video streaming traffic needs 100-500 KB per second for adequate quality, it quickly becomes pretty obvious that regulating wireless neutrality among multiple applications (not just video but music sharing, VOIP, peer-to-peer and others) would choke the system.

The result would be slower data speeds and reduced QoS guarantees for everyone.

In fairness, many sharp analysts – Hance Haney at Discovery comes to mind – have argued that this is a long-term non-issue since market innovation will increase wireless transport capacity. Fair enough and worthy of a good debate. But short-term, this issue can’t be regulated away.

This talk about the federal government mandating wireless neutrality reminds us of Will Rodgers’ famous advice to Woodrow Wilson about solving the German U-Boat problem. “Just bring the oceans to a boil,” he said, “I’ll leave the details to the technicians.”