The article misses that this is fundamentally an issue with the PHY level of "mobile" broadband systems.
If you've got a very simple radio, say, a ham 2 meter handset, you find there are interference patterns caused by multipath interference that cause the signal to get stronger and weaker as you move half a wavelength this way or that way. This causes a fluttering noise when you're listening to somebody transmitting from a car.
A more advanced radio that uses a spread-spectrum signal finds that at any moment of time, some parts of the signal's frequency range is in-phase and some is out-of-phase.
If your goal is to make a low-bandwidth signal robust, you can spread a low-bandwidth signal over a wide spectral range and you won't notice fading. On the other hand, if you're trying to send as much data as you possibly can in the bandwidth you've got, you're ultimately going to implement something like OFDM. Now, in an OFDM system, you're using frequencies in parallel to transmit more data, not to improve robustness. If you're sitting in one place your system can figure out what the fading is and work around it. If you're moving, the relative performance of the subchannels is always changing too fast for OFDM to work.
This is how you can have a good voice connection on your phone (which is using a PHY truly built for mobile operation) but not have it on for data (which is using a PHY built for high performance operation from a fixed point.)
I don't think you understood the article. It is not about the physical restrictions and trade-offs of mobile broadband. It is about the inefficiency of TCP on such connections. Current TCP implementations are optimized for wired networks which usually have fixed bandwidth and latency. They use dropped packages for congestion avoidance, interpreting package loss as a signal to slow down transmission.
Wireless networks with their higher packet loss (compared to wired ones) fool the sender into believing that the connection is satured. Combine this with the enormous buffer sizes used by mobile broadband systems and the TCP congestion control algorithm throttles the connection to an unusably slow level.
The author is not making a case for trading speed for reliability by using a different PHY, he is making a point for embracing the package loss and delays that exist in current mobile broadband systems and using those characteristics to create a smarter transport layer protocol to replace TCP on mobile devices.
In the big picture, however, it's generally better to fix the part of a system that's broken (the PHY) than it is to try to compensate for the underlying problem in upper layers.
It's also good to be careful about your terms. "Mobile" means operation out of a car or other motorized moving platform. "Portable" means a device that's being carried by a pedestrian. When the bandwidth of a radio channel gets wide, these become very different environments.
All I can say about new protocols is that you can go to your local Uni and find (quite literally) a ton of conference proceedings on this very topic. It seems that somebody has been funding a ludicrous amount of research on TCP replacements for decades without anything practical coming out of it.
Out of all that literature you ought to be able to find something that works or find a good reason why it can't be done.
Mobile also means "As in it's carried around as well as used in cars". It's a term for smartphone. They're using modern parlance to talk about smartphones, not radio parlance.
I probably missed half of what you were trying to explain there, but I didn't see a good solution. Are you suggesting we should give up speed for reliability at the PHY level?
It's a choice made at the PHY level and it's a tradeoff that's a little more complex than speed vs. reliability -- mobile operation introduces special challenges, as well as operation with weak signals (satellite), as well as operation in urban areas. There's a reason why Europe has 3 distinctly different digital television standards.
If you've got a very simple radio, say, a ham 2 meter handset, you find there are interference patterns caused by multipath interference that cause the signal to get stronger and weaker as you move half a wavelength this way or that way. This causes a fluttering noise when you're listening to somebody transmitting from a car.
A more advanced radio that uses a spread-spectrum signal finds that at any moment of time, some parts of the signal's frequency range is in-phase and some is out-of-phase.
If your goal is to make a low-bandwidth signal robust, you can spread a low-bandwidth signal over a wide spectral range and you won't notice fading. On the other hand, if you're trying to send as much data as you possibly can in the bandwidth you've got, you're ultimately going to implement something like OFDM. Now, in an OFDM system, you're using frequencies in parallel to transmit more data, not to improve robustness. If you're sitting in one place your system can figure out what the fading is and work around it. If you're moving, the relative performance of the subchannels is always changing too fast for OFDM to work.
This is how you can have a good voice connection on your phone (which is using a PHY truly built for mobile operation) but not have it on for data (which is using a PHY built for high performance operation from a fixed point.)