It's not just developing countries where Clinton sees an application for wireless technology.

"Wireless is going to play a huge role in trying to bring American health-care costs in line with that of our competitors while maintaining access to quality care in remote places that don't have traditional health care," he said.

But all those efforts that Clinton described, noble as they may be, would have come up short without a spirit of cooperation that required stakeholders to put aside narrow political gamesmanship or special-interest advocacy in favor of tackling the urgent problem at hand.

"In every case you have cooperation between at least a willing government, the private sector and often a nongovernmental organization," he said. "They've got a job to do so no one has any time to argue about politics."

Coinciding with Clinton's keynote and the final day of its show, CTIA released a study it commissioned the research group BSR to conduct examining the impact of wireless technology on global socioeconomic issues such as finance and health care.