And it’s official.  Barack Obama is the new President of the United States, and to welcome him over 2 million people flooded our nation’s capital on Tuesday.  Armed with their cell phones, BlackBerry’s, and laptop computers, this patriotic mass attacked the wireless networks and brought them to a sluggish crawl – one click at a time.

It’s moments like this that highlight how primitive our current wireless infrastructure truly is.  Sure, we enjoy the ability to go online on our phones, we love the applications that are making our lives easier every day, and we love that digital voice is getting cheaper every year…but we still don’t have a wireless infrastructure that can meet our needs and allow us to enjoy the inauguration of our 44^th President with photos, email, and simple text messages.

The need to move to 4G wireless networks has never been so publicly highlighted and visible.  As we begin sending more sophisticated packages of data – including HTML-rich emails, photos, audio, and video – we need to have a more sophisticated wireless infrastructure to support these advancements.  The WiMAX network that exists (but is not accessible yet to the public) in DC could have helped immensely on Tuesday. 

This story is likely to be lost in the shuffle of President Obama’s first days in office, but it’s an important story and it highlights the need for us to move to 4G ASAP.