alt Hacker NewsYou're describing the situation where the prisoner's dilemma has already gone wrong, with someone else not-nice shouting over you trying to be nice.
In other words: you don't need carrier sensing to work if you're not getting drowned in noise to begin with.
You can get this kind of interfere even if the signal from the router to your device is sitting just above the noise floor and the property next to you is doing the same thing. Both signals are so weak they get drowned out by an even weaker signal. The router on the other hand can’t tell the message is corrupted until your device responds.