@oroqi : I did see through all the episodes! And for the 'spectrum crunch' I almost went to the length of posting a comment to them, although having to register stopped me. So it's funny that you should ask me about that ...
So for your question, I've heard about bandwidth problems for a while already (I'm doing a Ph.D in electrical engineering):
That we are physically running out of bandwidth now is not perfectly true, as research has already progressed. We can use higher frequencies, and we can utilize the spectrum in better ways now, than we did when the current standards were devised. Some have claimed up to 100x improvement, although that might be a stretch. There is also a simple option of increasing the density of base-stations. If communication is kept more local it won't clutter the spectrum. Base-stations are however expensive things ... and it most likely has a limit to its effectiveness when the area gets small enough.
However, for practical and political reasons we might be running out of bandwidth. People's habits towards utilizing bandwidth and software practices will count towards if and when we hit a limit. (E.g. streaming video calls and cloud computing from mobile terminals can hit hard). Changing technologies isn't simple either. It takes time (years) to agree upon new standards, and of course when these standards are in place we must all change our handhelds, wifi routers and so on, so that the hardware complies to the new regime (years). Old technology must continue to operate alongside new, perhaps for decades. Political reasons include that getting rights to utilize a portion of the spectrum is big business, and there might be pretty intense lobby wars for this or that technology (which someone will have the patents for). It will take time to make these decisions as well.
In the event that the spectrum fills up in dense areas, you might see that companies raise prices. Because they want to ... (this can yield amazing profits), and because they now have an excuse, they must pay for whatever efforts they make to ensure quality of service. Good reasons not to increase price could be political regulation (EU/EEA has price limits, but I'm not sure what it's like in the US and elsewhere), and another, perhaps they would fear that people might change habits. Probably not so likely but it might limit price increases a little.
I would like to say to mobile computing developers in general that designing bandwidth hungry applications have some other downsides other than price. I am thinking of battery life. For the same amount of energy you need to send a number a few meters through the air you could probably do thousands if not hundreds of thousands (depending on the tecnology) of computations with that number. E.g. cloud computing isn't optimal for battery lifetime on mobile devices. So, whatever local pre- and post-processing you can do to minimize bandwidth use, without obvious loss of quality, it is probably going to make the consumer happier (although he probably wont know how it works).
So summing up. There is a lot more bandwidth in the spectrum, but it's not available yet. If things continue at the current pace you may see that prices increase a little bit for a while. This can have an impact on the popularity of app's and services according to how expensive they will be to use. The evil-doers here will probably be applications based on frequent streaming of large amounts of data (If your app downloads a new high-rez ad every 2 minutes it might anger users). If it gets bad and since people tend to generalize they might be a bit afraid to use their gadgets altogether. Hopefully phones can get built-in profilers so you can see how much each app costs you. However all this shall pass, and in the end we will see more available bandwidth, and with better utilization since we get smarter through abit adversity.
Anyway. I hope this clarifies a bit. I wouldn't be too worried. It's definitively not the end of the world
(they made a bit of a drama of it at Extra Credits).
