Political musing aside I think it may be disingenuous to compare modern collision-free Ethernet vs shared-medium solutions.
Modern Ethernet over twisted-pair connect directly to a switch, a quite intelligent piece of technology. During this transfer you will not get a collision because it is your wire. When all the various clients packets converge at the switch the software there will sort and buffer the traffic in a hopefully 'fair' way and then send all that traffic out a collision-free link. Repeat. (Note: old Ethernet did at one time transmit on a shared medium but most people thing of Ethernet as our modern twisted-pair-switch-n-router architecture).
ATM and other channel access methods[1] are solutions dealing with a different problem. A shared medium can quite easily become overwhelmed even if everyone is playing fair. If the link just has too many clients the network collapses. One might liken this to the "hotel wifi" or "stadium wifi" problem.
While I think more open wifi is good, the technical challenges are not trivial. Many hotels and stadiums are moving to WLAN Controller architectures coupled with highly directional APs. Just a bit ago we saw an article on how the Super Bowl will be RF Spectrum policed this time around - just to try and keep the shared medium working. There would be many policy questions around deploy, management, policing, etc. and many technical questions about channel access, network health, buffering, etc.
Modern Ethernet over twisted-pair connect directly to a switch, a quite intelligent piece of technology. During this transfer you will not get a collision because it is your wire. When all the various clients packets converge at the switch the software there will sort and buffer the traffic in a hopefully 'fair' way and then send all that traffic out a collision-free link. Repeat. (Note: old Ethernet did at one time transmit on a shared medium but most people thing of Ethernet as our modern twisted-pair-switch-n-router architecture).
ATM and other channel access methods[1] are solutions dealing with a different problem. A shared medium can quite easily become overwhelmed even if everyone is playing fair. If the link just has too many clients the network collapses. One might liken this to the "hotel wifi" or "stadium wifi" problem.
While I think more open wifi is good, the technical challenges are not trivial. Many hotels and stadiums are moving to WLAN Controller architectures coupled with highly directional APs. Just a bit ago we saw an article on how the Super Bowl will be RF Spectrum policed this time around - just to try and keep the shared medium working. There would be many policy questions around deploy, management, policing, etc. and many technical questions about channel access, network health, buffering, etc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_access_methods