This article provides an economic analysis of wireless communications that offers a framework for evaluating the relative desirability of the two proposed alternatives. First, it provides a concise description of the technological changes that have made open wireless networks a feasible alternative to licensing and spectrum property. Second, it offers a new way of describing the social cost of wireless communications that enables one to specify more precisely the tradeoff between property rights in spectrum and open wireless networks. I explain why spectrum property based systems will have systematically lower capacity than open wireless networks, and will grow capacity more slowly. This implies that they will only be more efficient, if at all, where the value of the communications they do clear is sufficiently larger than the value of the larger number of communications that an open wireless network would have cleared without sensitivity to their value. The real cost of a wireless communications is, however, highly variable, local, and dynamically changing, making efficient pricing of spectrum property relatively costly, and hence, potentially, imperfect. To the extent that pricing is indeed imperfect, its utilization is unlikely to offer a substantial advantage over value-insensitive open wireless networks. The article then briefly explains the advantages of open wireless networks in terms of innovation, consumer welfare, and security.