Visions on Net Neutrality: DeWayne Hendricks

From today's Freedom2Connect Conference in Silver Spring, Maryland.

DeWayne Hendricks

I’ve been an advocate for wireless a long time. I speak at a lot of conferences.

Three years ago I said wireless would be a much larger competitor and people called me out to lunch.

But look at where we are today. This municipal wireless thing is moving ahead. Every major city, it seems, has a plan in play.

Did this come out of nowhere? Where is it going? What did you miss?

Five years ago Yakima launched a public safety network of 560 miles square. That got it started. WiFi is used to deliver service to police cars. It’s not supposed to be able to do this. It’s not supposed to serve mobile vehicles. WiFi is doing things people didn’t imagine.

The people who are determining what wireless can and can’t do don’t have any standing, they’re not implementers.

A year ago counties started to do this. Quite a few counties had plans. There’s a county in the state of Washington that’s had a cloud of 4,000 square miles, in operation 2 years. It
‘s operated by a utility company, Columbia RDA.

But you don’t hear about these things.

All you hear are about the big cities.

There seem to be some forces at work…you’re not hearing the success stories.

To me a county is more interesting than a city. Cities are contained within counties. To herd a bunch of cities and do something in common is a story I want to know about.

Sandoval County, in New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, put out an RFP in 2004. They have 3,700 square miles, a little smaller than Connecticut, and performance levels in that cloud better than a telco or cable operator.

My company won the bid. We started last October. We finished the first phase, and we’re 6 months ahead of schedule, we’re under budget.

We’ll deliver 100 Mbps to this county, using technology available today.

This is the tipping point. Wireless will be a competitive threat to the cableco and telco. This exceeds FIOS. This is no brag. This is fact.

What’s changed is that we have commodity WiFi hardware and these radios are pretty good and pretty cheap. And we’re using how to deploy them. When the radios are that cheap, don’t do a faster radio, use link aggregation which is common in Linux.

The tools make the rules.

The other thing is getting the cost of bandwidth down. There’s a resource called the National LambdaRail . It’s a transcontinental backbone. You’ve heard of Internet 2  – it’s 4 times faster.

We’re trying to drive the cost per megabit down to less than a dollar. Right now it costs $25. The University of New Mexico pays $80 per meg per month. We’ve run it down to $50, we’ll take it to $25. This is the big  barrier.

Why do 100 Mbps if no one can afford it.

We’ve got to get the cost down.

In Hong Kong you can get a megabit for 24 cents.

Martin is wrong. Screw him. We need to be competitive. Let’s do that.

Once you know something’s possible it changes everything.

There will be more Sandoval Counties. We will get in the news. Wireless is the wild card. Let’s play it.