[MLB-WIRELESS] [Fwd: [>Htech] /. The Island of the Wireless Guerrillas]

[dwayne]

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Subject: [>Htech] /. The Island of the Wireless Guerrillas
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 14:36:42 +0100 (MET)
From: Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
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http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,38492,00.html

The Island of the Wireless Guerrillas
By: Erick Schonfeld
Issue: April 2002
Print Article | Email This Article

Hawaii has given us many great things. Surfing. The ukulele. Don Ho. But
of all of Hawaii's bounty, perhaps no gift is more wonderful than the one
it is giving now: A group of dedicated tech junkies that's creating our
wireless broadband future.

As he drives his white pickup truck through the craggy lava fields of the
Big Island of Hawaii, Bill Wiecking casts his eyes across a terrain of
otherworldly beauty. Rising in the distance is a volcanic fog created by
streams of lava seeping into the sea. Most people can only fantasize about
living on an island of such natural splendor; Wiecking thinks he can
improve upon the surroundings. He's a lifelong technology junkie with a
peculiar but abiding love of antennas, an excellent example of which is
the plastic pole sticking 8 feet straight up out of the back of his truck.
These lava fields are, he says, "a proving ground."

What he's trying to prove is that wireless broadband Internet access can
work, and work affordably, even in a place like this. Across most of
Hawaii, DSLs and cable modems are rumors, leaving dial-up Web access -- to
Wiecking, suffocatingly limited -- as the only alternative. Yet here among
the volcanoes, Wiecking is firing off e-mails and pulling in National
Public Radio over the Net at lightning speed on the laptop in his truck.
His mind, Ph.D.-trained in physiology, seems to need a constant flow of
information the way a fish's gills need a constant flow of water. "This is
the only way I can stay sane," Wiecking says. His info fixes are made
possible by a do-it-yourself wireless network he has pieced together to
cover more than 300 square miles of the Big Island.

It's a decidedly homegrown affair. The pole jutting from the bed of
Wiecking's pickup grabs wireless Internet signals beamed from the dozen
base stations he has set up across the island. The base stations are
wherever he can put them: on the roof of his house, at the homes of
friends, at schools, even on top of a roving psychedelic bus. Wiecking's
technological secret is a wireless standard called 802.11b, more
felicitously known as Wi-Fi (for "wireless fidelity"). Conventional 802.11
networks have a range of no more than 300 feet, but by using a hodgepodge
of cheap amplifiers, antennas, and other gear, Wiecking has been able to
stoke up the range of some of his base stations to more than 26 miles. Now
people all over the island are tapping into Wiecking's wireless links,
surfing the Web at speeds as much as 100 times greater than standard
modems permit. High school teachers use the network to leapfrog a plodding
state effort to wire schools. Wildlife regulators use it to track
poachers. And it's all free. Wiecking has built his network through a
coalition of educators, researchers, and nonprofit organizations; with the
right equipment and passwords, anyone who wants to tap in can do so, at no
charge.

If a lot of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. We've been hearing
about our wonderful broadband future for so long, it's startling to see it
actually beginning to take shape. And it's not just here in Hawaii: A
quietly growing legion of wireless guerrillas is using 802.11 -- and
components ranging from Pringles cans to wire-wrapped plastic tubing -- to
set up wireless networks in at least 40 U.S. cities, from Seattle to New
York to Austin, and many more cities overseas. The dream is to create
enough overlapping networks so that wherever you go, you can open a laptop
equipped with an 802.11 antenna and hook into high-speed Web access. Some
Wi-Fi missionaries are techno utopians who share their high-speed Internet
access for free. Others are entrepreneurs setting up for-pay networks in
cafes, hotel lobbies, airports, and backcountry towns.

Whatever their motives, Wiecking and his co-enthusiasts are showing that
the prospects for broadband access may not be as dim or distant as most of
us think. In fact, the Wi-Fi cause may turn out to be a sleeper
technological movement -- like the Internet itself -- that creeps up on
the world, gaining adherents without fanfare until it's suddenly
everywhere. The 802.11 wave certainly has a crucial element all sleeper
movements share: The utter devotion of a happy band of tinkerers and true
believers. And they think they've only scratched the surface of what their
systems can achieve. "You are just seeing the little bird cracking out of
the eggshell," Wiecking says.

Wiecking seems to have been born to the cause. The son of a Navy pilot and
communications specialist, Wiecking moved frequently as a child; one of
the few constants in those days, he says, was that "we always had antennas
on the roof." He built his first ham radio when he was 7. Radio became a
way to combat the isolation he felt as his family traipsed from place to
place, and he sought ever-better antennas to extend the range of his
world.

Wiecking came to Hawaii 20 years ago, right after college. At 43, he has
an athletic frame; he has run the Kilauea Volcano Marathon for 19 straight
years. The course traverses a crater floor filled with crunchy lava rocks.
"They're like potato chips," he says. Very jagged potato chips. "Your
shoes are toast by the time you finish." For 18 years he taught high
school physics, where a favorite lesson involved showing students how to
build their own computers -- and where he was the school's de facto
computer network administrator. In 1998 he landed a job at the Maui High
Performance Computing Center as its educational outreach manager.

Wiecking's wireless quest really got going about two years ago, when he
and Alan Nakagawa, a local high school biology teacher, seized on 802.11
networks as a cut-rate alternative to wiring the Big Island's schools and
to extend their Internet reach. The plan struck a special chord with
Wiecking; to him, the Web was the ultimate ham radio, an inexhaustible
source of connection and learning, and he was exasperated by the
difficulties of Internet surfing on the Big Island. He built his first
base station at his own home in Kameula; today that house looks rather
like a missile tracking station, bristling with antennas. Wiecking quickly
became the island's acknowledged 802.11 top dog. "Nobody knows more about
802.11 than Bill," says Marc Benioff, a well-connected tech industry
veteran and the CEO of Salesforce.com, who owns a vacation home with an
802.11 connection on the Big Island. Benioff is sold not just on Wiecking
but on 802.11 in general; it's the "next killer app. It's going to change
the world," he insists.

Two aspects of 802.11 help explain why it inspires people like Benioff to
such rhapsodies. The first is that the networks are incredibly cheap to
build. All 802.11 systems have to piggyback on other high- speed Internet
connections, such as T-1 lines, DSLs, or cable modems. Those become the
original sources for the Internet signals that an 802.11 base station
rebroadcasts. But one high-speed connection can support numerous base
stations. The components of each of Wiecking's base stations cost about
$1,000, and can in turn support many users.

An even more compelling aspect of 802.11 networks is that their very
existence seems to unleash people's creativity, and they find countless
surprising ways to put the systems to work. Nakagawa's biology students,
for instance, are regulars aboard "the Hula Bus," named for its Ken Kesey
paint job. Wiecking equipped the bus with wireless antennas and amplifiers
so that it can maintain a high- speed link with one of his base stations;
the bus also acts as a base station itself, so students can collect field
data and upload it remotely using laptops. "The kids are out doing real
science," Nakagawa says. He takes students out on the bus to test the
island's watershed for pollutants and to study whales' migratory patterns.

At the private Hawaii Preparatory Academy, students also are making the
most of the wireless network. Jill Quaintance, a 16-year-old junior,
monitors threatened sea turtles on a beach 20 miles away. "You can go to
any high point on the island, aim your antenna, and you are streaming
turtles," Wiecking marvels.

A camera on the beach beams video via a wireless link to the school, where
Quaintance watches on TV and computer monitors. She will present her
findings alongside professional marine researchers in April at the
International Symposium on Sea Turtle Conservation and Biology in Miami.

On another part of the coast where turtles bask, Wiecking persuaded
retiree Mary Morrison to let him use her beachfront house as a base
station. He and Nakagawa are experimenting with underwater wireless
cameras for more extensive turtle-watching. The cameras are tethered to
plastic buoys that they learned how to keep upright from a biologist who
used to be a minesweeper in the Swedish navy. Morrison is happy to help
the turtle researchers, and she gets free high-speed Web access instead of
the dial-up connection she used to endure.

There are numerous other novel uses for the network. One of Wiecking's
base stations is on a solar- powered ranger's cabin halfway up Mauna Kea,
the Big Island's 13,800-foot volcano; the state Department of Fish and
Wildlife uses a remote camera there to keep an eye on a feeding station
for the endangered state bird, the nene. The camera streams video back to
a ranger station at the base of the volcano. Meanwhile, Wiecking's
13-year-old stepson, Andrew, recently used the technology for an inventive
solution to sibling management. He placed wireless cameras around the
house to spy on his younger brother and sister. "I put a stop to that,"
says Wiecking's wife, Sydney. "Our bedroom could have been next."

Wiecking's wireless campaign hasn't always gone smoothly. Like all Wi-Fi
evangelists, he sometimes encounters tricky technical problems. Since
802.11 works in the unlicensed 2.4-gigahertz band of the radio spectrum,
signals often collide with interference from the dozens of other gadgets
that use the same frequency, such as cordless phones and microwave ovens.
There are also line-of-sight problems; buildings, hills, even wet trees
can block an 802.11 signal. Then there are the social issues. Wiecking's
early efforts were slowed because some residents feared the technology. He
recalls some asking, "Are you irradiating our kids?" (The answer is no.)
Not long ago, he tried to set up a network on the privately owned island
of Niihau, a cultural preserve where a dialect of Hawaiian is still the
official language. But educators were concerned about potential cultural
contamination from the Web, and Wiecking abandoned the effort.

And how do Wiecking's experiments sit with the telecommunications
industry? The Wi-Fi movement doesn't yet pose a major problem for most
phone and cable giants, the companies whose DSL equipment and cable modems
have caused such frustration. But the potential threat to these firms is
obvious. One danger is that the high-speed Internet customers of the phone
and cable companies will join the wireless underground and start
rebroadcasting their DSL or cable modem connections to others for free.
The communications companies can be counted on to view that as essentially
theft, like pirating cable TV signals. They will try to stamp it out if
the practice continues to grow.

In a sense the 802.11 movement is where the cellular-phone business was in
its early days. Without roaming agreements, security innovations, and many
other improvements, it'll be hard for 802.11 operators to build
sustainable, nationwide businesses that could compete with the big guys.
But the number of small wireless ISPs and entrepreneurs trying to
commercialize the technology is growing fast. Earthlink (ELNK) founder Sky
Dayton's new company, Boingo Wireless, hopes to create a kind of
federation of 802.11 hot spots so that someone paying a monthly fee can
access the Internet in various locations across the country. And there are
more than 1,000 upstart 802.11 ISPs that are racing to bring broadband to
places where the lumbering phone and cable companies have yet to deliver.
For instance, Hurricane Internet is offering 802.11 broadband service to
about 50 customers in Honolulu. Hurricane connects its base stations
through its own dedicated T-1 lines, so it doesn't raise the piracy
problem. "The only reason we started playing with wireless two years ago
was to compete with the cable guys and the Verizons," says Kalani Miller,
one of three employees at Hurricane. "We want to eliminate them."

That won't happen anytime soon, obviously. But Hurricane and other small
ISPs are establishing a beachhead by bringing the power of broadband to
people who could not otherwise get it. One of Hurricane's customers,
physician Dan Davis, heads up Interactive Care Technologies. He's hooking
up health clinics with 802.11 so that doctors can have video consultations
with one another about patient care. His next step is to use 802.11 for
monitoring patients in their homes, particularly senior citizens. Davis
has developed easy-to-use Web pads for the task; they feature an
instant-on button, a touchscreen, a miniature camera, and a wireless
802.11 modem. "If we can give a senior citizen some extra access to a
doctor or a nurse, we can delay nursing home admission, maybe forever,"
Davis says.

The push to commercialize 802.11 poses one other major challenge -- to the
soul of the cause itself. Some 802.11 purists believe that their crusade
started as altruistic and free and should stay that way. They think their
movement can light the way to a broadband future by continuing its steady
grassroots advance, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.

Wiecking isn't so sure. He has had some notions about how to make money
off the technology, although it's not exactly a top priority.
Salesforce.com's Benioff was so wild about a Wiecking idea for an 802.11
billing system that he recently set Wiecking up with Mark Goldstein, a
venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates -- the kind of guy,
Benioff says, "you get back to the same day." Wiecking didn't e-mail
Goldstein for several days; by then, the moment had passed. Wiecking says
he was too busy to contact the VC right away. There were turtle-streaming
components to fix, and antennas to align.


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