Largent says the industry is trying to lobby the government to auction off spectrum that it is currently sitting on, starting with a 25MHz tranche of spectrum in the range of 1755MHz to 1780MHz. Largent notes that the government also has spectrum spanning from 1780MHz through 1850MHz and 2155MHz through 2180MHz that could be used for mobile broadband if the government chose to auction it off.

The search for more spectrum has become more challenging ever since the 2008 auction of spectrum on the 700MHz band, where both Verizon and AT&T won rights to prime blocks of wireless real estate by bidding a combined $16 billion. Earlier this year the FCC axed a plan by LightSquared to build and operate an LTE network on the 1.6GHz satellite band after a report released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that LightSquared couldn't operate its network without critically interfering with GPS services that rely on the same spectrum. Largent says that he's disappointed that LightSquared couldn't get permission to build its network, but he adds that CTIA is working on engineering fixes to antennae to make sure that future upstart companies will be able to build LTE networks that don't interfere with other networks on adjacent spectrum.

"Part of what we're looking at is how to address the receiver performance issue that prevented them from coming to market," says Chris Guttman-McCabe, CTIA's vice president of regulatory affairs. "We need to make sure that if an entity is using a band of spectrum that they're only encumbering that spectrum and aren't running into any other networks' bands."

In the meantime, you can expect to hear plenty of talk from the incumbent carriers at CTIA this year about how much duress their networks will come under without fresh spectrum, especially during a carrier roundtable where the CEOs of all four major wireless companies - Sprint's Dan Hesse, AT&T's Ralph de la Vega, Verizon's Dan Mead and T-Mobile's Philipp Humm - will talk shop with CNBC's Jim Cramer. CTIA is slated to take place at the Ernest N. Moral Convention Center in New Orleans from May 8-10.

in Network World's Anti-malware section.