********************************
The COOK Report on Internet
July, 2000 (Vol.9, No. 4)
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(c) COOK Network Consultants (Not to be shared or in any way
distributed outside the confines of your license agreement.)
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CONTENTS:

Broadband Spread Spectrum Wireless Extends Internet Reach of ISPs & 
Field Research Scientists -- Increased Radio Speed and Decline in 
Price Enabling Smaller ISPs to Compete with Cable and DSL Internet 
Access --
NSF PI Dave Hughes Explains How Wireless Data Gathering by 
Environmental Scientists Will Yield Huge Increase in Network Traffic, 
		pp. 1-15

Assessing the Current State of IP Telephony
Data and Voice Converging at the Protocol and Application Levels
Telephony Becomes Tool to Be Activated from a Web Page While
New Web Oriented Applications Make QoS Less an Issue, pp. 16 - 22


Commoditization of IP Bandwidth
Some Unresolved Technical and Structural Issues
Interview with Noel Chiappa Emphasizes Uncertainty About Ability of 
Routing System to Cope with Massive Changes,  pp. 23 - 26

ICANN Footnotes:  What Some Others Are Saying about Arbitrary and 
Capricious Acts of ICANN, and Network  Solutions, pp. 15, 22, 26, 
31-33, 36

Executive Summary, pp. 34 - 35

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Hughes on Wireless  pp. 1 - 15

We interview Dave Hughes, principal investigator of two NSF wireless 
projects and owner of Old Colorado Communications on the state of the 
art of TCP/IP radios for wireless ISPs and for scientific 
environmental field research (his second major NSF project). He 
points out how a fall in prices and increase in capability has pushed 
the price of 10 Mbps radios to well under $1000 each.

He views Cisco's purchase of Aironet as a major move forward for the 
wireless spread spectrum industry however the impact of this will 
ultimately depend on how Cisco integrates Aironet products into its 
business line and whether it comes to see itself as a provider of 
connectivity solutions. Cisco has announced its own 45 megabit per 
second LMDS radio and is also bringing out a line of UNII band radios 
limited to five miles in transmission range.

These new radios can be remotely logged into and configured - 
something that greatly increases their utility for ISPs. ISPs 
meanwhile are going wireless. Breezecom claims ISP 500 customers in 
North America. Some 100 megabit per second radios are beginning to 
appear. One such is made by Proxim.

While line of sight problems are critical for these radios, Cisco is 
claiming to have overcome some of the drop off of communications 
caused by Fresnel Zone problems. Subtle physical differences found at 
each site can mar transmission capability. ISPs must have staff 
skilled in installation. The key business model is focused on 
connecting small business and will be increasingly focused on 
delivery of broadband services to residential customers who either 
don't want or can't get adequate DSL or cable connection.

Hughes discusses in detail the way that the E-rate increases by an 
order of magnitude the cost of connecting public schools to the 
Internet by prohibiting the schools from buying wireless equipment 
and requiring them instead to rent leased lines from the local 
exchange carrier year after year. Under the Texas subsidy, the 
monthly cost of the Internet connection is multiplied by 12 and to 
that figure is added the cost of hardware (DSU/CSU for example) 
needed for the phone connection. The total sum becomes the amount of 
subsidy for which the district is eligible. The district is then free 
to spend the money on the telco connection or on radios and a 
wireless connection. Wireless normally wins because the district 
after costing out the alternatives, normally finds that the cost of 
radios and plug in via radio to an ISP leaves them several thousand 
dollars left over.

At the 2.4 giga hertz range most manufacturers make radios that 
operate at one tenth of a watt or 100 miliwatts rather than the 
allowed power of one watt. They do this because [such radios can be 
sold in Europe, and] it saves considerable money in the cost of 
manufacturing. Customer don't seem to mind because if their cheaper 
100 miliwatt radio won't connect they can buy an inline amplifier for 
$750 and increase the power to a full watt. When this has been done 
and under ideal line of sight conditions the radios have successfully 
work over distances of up to seventy miles.

Given the lack of incentive for wireline telco's to bring broadband 
into rural America, the FCC is has issued a notice of inquiry on the 
subject of a Software Defined Radio (SDR). One where smart software 
controls the radio - its power, its frequency spread, and other 
technical characteristics. Major spectrum possibilities could be 
achieved simply by allowing the design and use of radios that could 
tune themselves in accordance with the operational reality of their 
surroundings.

Hughes points out that one way a user who lives close to an ISP pop 
can help to spread the benefits of wireless technology is to 
ascertain whether the ISP operator with allow him to plug a radio 
into the ISPs pop connection. If so after a [site] sight survey to 
determine that radios needed are available at reasonable price, the 
user can install the radios and plug one into the ISP's Ethernet.

To ensure that they can inter operate with each other, radios are 
being built to the 802.11 standard. As shown by Apple Computer in its 
Macintosh Airport Base Station and Airport card architecture, it is 
possible for someone to spend upwards of a thousand dollars to 
connect to an ISP with a point to multi-point multi megabit radio and 
then by placing an omni directional antenna on his roof to connect 
and relay as many as twenty neighbors using $100 PCMCIA radios 
plugged into their lap tops.

Of special benefit to ISPs selling wireless connectivity is the 
ability in software to throttle down to agreed upon rates, the speed 
of the connections that radios hey supply to their customers give. 
Also of significance is a new Ethernet PPP protocol that means they 
need not assign each customer their own IP number.

"Watch out UUNET, the frogs and the shrimp are coming - using your 
bandwidth" - Dave Hughes

Having laid out this general background, Hughes goes on to discuss 
aspects of his current NSF funded research on wireless and satellite 
connectivity for environmental research.

Hughes emphasizes Tachyon which has just come on line in the spring 
of 2000 with Concentric as its Internet providing partner as the 
first company to provide reasonably priced bi-directional satellite 
linkage to the internet. Tachyon provides a ground station that talks 
to the satellite for only $5,000.. It sells bi-directional, true 
TCP/IP, at 2 megabits down and 256k up, for $2000 a month, or 300kbps 
down and 64k up, for $795.

Hughes describes the National Environmental Observatory Network as 
part of an expanding need for environmental data collection - one 
that is so broad in its proposed scope that it looks as though only 
wireless data monitors may do an cost effective job of data gathering.

He talks about several projects in which he is working with 
environmental scientists whom he is surprised to find are generally 
unaware of the what improvement in wireless data gathering technology 
over the past five years make it possible to do.

The kinds of data gathering involved are quite diverse. For example 
the transmission from sensors the chemical composition of lake water 
in timed coordination with the overhead passes of a satellite. A 
second is the collection of light readings from a network sensors on 
a forest floor and the transmission of that data from each individual 
sensor a short distance to a data collector.  The collector, in turn 
after perhaps encapsulating it in a tiny Linux data base, transmits 
it back to the research station and the Internet. A third is the 
capture of sound - in this case the call of the coqui frog from the 
rain forest of Puerto Rico. A fourth is the visual observation of 
shrimp transmitted in high bandwidth in real time. A possible fifth 
would include the use of partially buried sensors to grab, chemically 
analyze via tiny Linux and transmit the composition of the gasses of 
a prairie fire as the fire ignites the material around the sensor and 
passes over head. Other phenomena measured may be as diverse a earth 
quakes and hurricanes. From the point of view of Internet 
infrastructure this means yet another huge increase in bandwidth that 
will be generated and dumped on to backbones. Watch out UUNET, the 
frogs and the shrimp are coming - using your bandwidth.

Rosenberg on IP Telephony,  pp. 16- 22

We interview Johnathon Rosenberg Chief Scientist of dynamicSoft. 
Rosenburg updates us on the outcome of the Megaco protocol which is 
designed to facilitate the communication of IP telephony gateways 
with SS7 switches in the Public Switched Telephone Network.  The ITU 
successfully cooperated in the development of Megaco and in January 
2000 held a meeting with in Geneva with a small handful of the top 
IETF leadership.  [Editor's Note and not part of Rosenberg interview: 
Reports from attendees at the meeting indicate that for he first time 
ITU leadership was overtly eager to cooperate with he IETF in 
completing the protocols necessary to achieve converge of the voice 
and data networks.  It was also interesting to note in view of the 
evolving relationship between the IETF and ICANN that Karen Rose, the 
number two person to Becky Burr also attended.]

Among the other protocols that Rosenberg describes are ENUM, PINT, 
SPIRIT and SCTP.   Here the purpose begins to be to have a users 
computer link with the PSTN and initiate events there that formerly 
could have been done only through the network's intelligent switching 
system.  While Quality of Service issues are still unresolved and are 
critical to those who would merely move voice telephony to the 
Internet, Rosenburg and dynamicsoft advocate a blending of internet 
and telephony capabilities. Rosenberg points out that  with every new 
medium added to the mix the number of applications enabled grows 
exponentially.  Thus voice telephony over the internet is nothing 
more than the transfer of a standard century year old service. 
Internet, video, and voice raises a host of new possibilities.  Add 
the web to this and the opportunity for flexible and powerful 
productivity enhancing tools seems vast.

Using the SIP protocol dynamicSoft specializes in the provision of 
client server based tool kits that can be tailored to the needs of 
individual companies.  Under these conditions it becomes possible to 
think in terms of where the arrival of specified kinds of email could 
trigger application with the telephone network on behalf of the user. 
Rosenberg sees a converged future where the only telephony that is 
worth having is web-enabled.

Obstacles to Bandwitdh Commoditization, pp. 23- 26

In Part 3 of an on going series we interview Noel Chiappa developer 
of the first multi-protocol router.  The interview focused on issues 
involved in the development of a commodity exchange for bandwidth. 
While we speculate on the changes in the power structure of the 
Internet industry that this is likely to bring on, Noel points out 
that the thing most likely to slow the commoditization of bandwidth 
is "that Internet routing, isn't ready for it yet. It's all spit and 
bailing wire.  . . . . Commoditization implies a tremendous amount of 
flexibility, a high rate of change in topology in the way things are 
connected together. It also requires a very robust infrastructure. 
That's one thing we certainly do not have. A lot of this stuff runs 
because there's a lot of smart people tweaking it all the time. And 
I'm not sure we have enough smart people."  For example when one buys 
an OC3 from San Francisco to Atlanta to start at Sunday midnight and 
run for 24 hours one is going to want to be certain that the 
interfaces with the rest of the Internet adjust smoothly.  To do 
this: "You want the routing to adjust very quickly so that you can 
use it and when it goes away, you want the routing to adjust back. 
And that's my question: can the routing really do it?"  "If you start 
dorking around with the topology of the network, are the protocols 
and everything else in it robust enough to deal with that kind of 
sort of brownian motion in the connectivity?"


Engineering issues; IPv6, NAT, IP Telephony Conundrum, Optical Cross 
Connect pp. 27 - 31

On the IETF, NANOG, and Inet-Access lists the IPv6 versus IPv4 and 
NATed-end-points religious wars continued. It has become fairly clear 
that the inertia favoring the continued use of IPv4 is vast. A change 
over would be hugely expensive and no one seems to know quite how to 
incentivise network operators both on the back bones and end points 
to do it. Suggestions as extreme as have the federal government 
mandate a switch were heard. Apart from a desire a desire to salvage 
protocols like IPsec that were written with end-to-end network 
transparency in mind, there was the growing realization that many of 
perceived benefits of IP telephony could not be achieved IP address 
translation devices (NAT) boxes stood in the way. Richard Shockey put 
it bluntly "The deconstruction of the PSTN will be impossible without 
the introduction of IPv6 and the elimination of NAT's in private 
networks." We present some highlights of the discussions.

Discontent with the policies of the routing registries is growing. 
Sean Doran presented a useful critique of the current policy.  An 
excerpt - This is a system which enforces a "one-seller" (the IANA), 
"one buyer" (one may return addresses to IANA only) model, which 
flies in the face of free markets, and perversely imposes costs upon 
consumers.

Although I am happy that there are people trying to conserve IPv4 
addresses and also encourage sensible routing announcements by 
providing not less than a sizeable aggregatable range to qualified 
buyers, the qualification process is tricky and gets trickier as 
one's business grows.

Finally on NANOG Tony Li had a few things to say about optical cross 
connects.  "An optical cross connect, functioning along with IP 
routing and an intelligent traffic management system can be used to 
dynamically place bandwidth where it is needed, when it is needed. 
The optical plane provides an active provisioning fabric, allowing 
the network to be more efficient. And a more efficient network makes 
for a more profitable ISP."

ICANN- NSI Footnotes, pp. 15, 22, 31 - 33, 36

We continue to document some of the more egregious actions of ICANN 
and Network Solutions.  As the first footnote we republish Milton 
Mueller's April 25th showing the ridiculous self-serving nature of 
Roger Cochetti's comments  in favoring the introduction of two new to 
level domains. Mueller makes fours points and then goes on to under 
score each one in crisp detail.

 "1. It would require the new (shop) registry to offer exactly the 
same terms and prices as the NSI com/net/org registry 2. It 
drastically limits the number of competing registries, for no good 
reason. 3. Its ownership arrangements would institutionalize 
cartel-like controls on the name space. 4. It would put NSI in charge 
of the back-office services of one the .banc registry, further 
reinforcing NSI's dominance of the domain name registry market."

The second footnote is about the Europeans who are beginning to 
discover ICANN.  Some large corporate content forces there have 
mounted campaigns designed with the deluded hype that European 
participation in the ICANN at large membership process can give 
Europe a role in ICANN's regulation of the Internet. More information 
may be found at 
http://www.democratic-internet.de/pages/english/home.htm

For those who have watched how ICANN operates in ignoring the wishes 
of all its working groups the following passage seems just a tad 
misleading "One thing is certain: the Internet is largely beyond the 
reach of national attempts to regulate it. A new culture of 
responsibility is developing. Self-regulation of the Net -Internet 
Governance -appears to represent a promising approach."

The third footnote is a May 10th essay by Brett Fausett titled: 
"ICANN Board Violates Bylaws in Selection of Committee Members And 
Continues to Work in Closed, Secret Sessions".  Brett explains how 
the ICANN Board in a meeting on April 6th, that in violation of 
ICANN's bylaws was not disclosed until May 9th, maneuvered the 
announcement of a technical elections committee and a nominating 
committee in such a way as to achieve a fait accompli and deprive the 
Internet community of all opportunity for input into committee 
membership.

We have authored the 4th footnote which presents some new information 
on the events of  July 1999 at Network Solutions. We offer a 
hypothesis of why Jim Rutt broke his pledge made to the Internet in 
Rutt Report #1 on June 22, 1999.

The 5th Footnote documents NSI's security lapse May 9 when a user 
found a CGI script that allowed anyone to read any file on NSI's 
secure systems.  the user turn the script into a url that pulled down 
the names of NSI's secure servers and the logins of their authorized 
users and log ins. We reprint the contents of what the script 
retrieved

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BROADBAND SPREAD SPECTRUM WIRELESS EXTENDS INTERNET REACH OF ISPs & 
FIELD RESEARCH SCIENTISTS -- INCREASED RADIO SPEED AND DECLINE IN 
PRICE ENABLING SMALLER ISPs TO COMPETE WITH CABLE AND DSL INTERNET 
ACCESS --
NSF PI DAVE HUGHES EXPLAINS HOW WIRELESS DATA GATHERING BY 
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTISTS WILL YIELD HUGE INCREASE IN NETWORK TRAFFIC

Editor's Note: Dave Hughes is the owner of Old Colorado City 
Communications. See <http://www.oldcolo.com and manages, and for his 
NSF research projects -  http://wireless.oldcolo.com>. He has been an 
independent networking visionary for more than twenty years. He was 
technical advisor to Big Sky Telegraph, linking remote schools of 
Montana to a University and the net in the late 1980s and early 90s. 
He owns his own ISP company, and uses wireless in its both up and 
downstream connections. Since 1995 he has been doing research for the 
National Science Foundation in the grass roots use of no license 
wireless in remote areas, including Mongolia, and beginning in the 
fall of 1999 no license wireless and satellite technology for 
biological and environmental science. We interviewed Dave on March 
18, 2000. We also updated the interview in early May, 2000.

Part One
Wireless ISPs

COOK Report: It is said that there have been tremendous improvements 
in spread spectrum radios in the last couple of years. Are these 
mainly driven by better digital signal processors or by a whole lot 
of stuff?

Hughes: It's a combination of things. One thing that kick-started the 
whole rush to go from two megabit radios, (the E1 standard in 
Europe), to 11 megabits per second was the Harris Semiconductor 
'Prism' chipset which had a much faster chipping rate and permitted 
the development of much faster direct sequence spread spectrum radios.

COOK Report: What is a chipping rate as opposed to a CPU rate?

Hughes: It's how fast the chipset can handle switching from one 
frequency to another while handling the packets of data being 
broadcast or received. Harris explanation is at 
http://www.zettweb.com/CDROMs/cdrom006/prism/

COOK Report: I see, in other words, how rapidly it can dance around.

Hughes: In a manner of speaking, yes. With direct sequence 
modulation, under the FCC rules, with a faster chipping rate, the FCC 
was able to permit the basic signal processes that allowed 
manufacturers across the board to jump up to a rate of 11 megabits 
per second from the previous 2Mbps.

COOK Report: In other words, if you get a 500% increase in your 
chipping rate, then you can get a 500% increase in your bandwidth?

Hughes: It's not quite that simple.

COOK Report: But it's related?

Broadband Comes to Spread Spectrum Wireless

Hughes: Yeah, it's related to the rate, and of course you realize, 
when you say 11 megabits per second, that you're also saying LAN. 
Wireless LAN, 10BaseT protocol speed. So there's no accident that 
everybody came roaring out at 11mbps because you will find a 10BaseT 
connection built into the back of all these radios. And with such a 
connection, you end up extending the wired LAN from inside of a 
building, to a wireless wide area network, or WAN.  That connection 
can span a city, or reach across a rural county, at the same speed as 
if the network were all wired. Acting just like a wired network. 
That's a huge, huge step, because for  the first time these radios 
operating at LAN speed can connect separate LANs without slow, or 
costly, wired pipes acting as a bottleneck for their performance.

Now I wasn't too impressed with Aironet radios three years ago, when 
I was buying radios for the first NSF project. But now they have come 
out with an 11 megabit per second family of radios, as did Lucent, as 
did Solectek and others. They all happen to be running, though, under 
the FCC rules for 'direct sequence' modulation, which is a different 
way to modulate the signal than frequency hopping. Now Breezecom, a 
very successful company that started in Israel and has been brought 
to the U.S., also has frequency-hopping radios that, for the moment, 
operate at less than LAN speed.  They are good radios and have a 
large market share.

COOK Report: Okay, now do both of these "flavors" (direct sequence 
and frequency-hopping) fall under FCC Part 15 no license regulations?

Hughes: Oh, yes.

COOK Report: From an operational point of view why would you use 
direct sequence rather than frequency hoping or vice-versa?

Hughes: They differ in their ability to handle interference. Direct 
Sequence Spread Spectrum radios have more efficient switching by 
using Phase Shift Keying  (PSK). They seem to be cheaper to make. And 
since they can operate at 11Mpbs while Frequency hopping radios are 
limited to 2Mbps, that is a huge advantage. The rules of the FCC to 
this date, have not permitted frequency hopping to reach 11 megabits 
per second.

COOK Report: And still do not?

Hughes: There's pressure and formal filings now at the FCC to change 
their rules to accommodate the new technologies. For example take 
Breezecom, which has a large piece of the market. They're quite 
successful, and we've used their radios, too. They operate at 1 
megabit per second for 7 miles. The problem is they're 
frequency-hoppers. Given what their competition is doing, they want 
to come out with frequency hopping radios that operate at 11 megabits 
per second. And as soon as the FCC approves the changes - and there 
is no reason to believe they won't, then frequency hoppers can get up 
to the same speed, in the same frequency bands that everybody else 
does. But all that underscores just how bleeding edge these 
technologies are - the FCC is having a hard time keeping up with the 
rate of change.

COOK Report: What are the prices of the 11 megabit per second radios?

Hughes: They have started coming down. The early 11 Mbps Solectek 
Radio was $9,000 two years ago. Then out came Aironets, Lucents - 
competitor's that started out thousands of dollars cheaper. Right 
now, I can buy a PCMIA card for my laptop that cost $165 from Aironet 
that operates at 11 megabits per second, half duplex. Which really 
means about 5-6 Mbps true throughput. Which is 3-5 times faster than 
a T-1. And I can buy a Teletronics 2.4Ghz, 2Mbps radio for $500 for 
the base unit, and only $99 for the client radio.

COOK Report: So is it safe to assume that you can buy an actual 11 
megabit per second radio for under $1,000?

Hughes: Yes.

COOK Report: Way under a thousand?

Hughes: Yes. But there is a difference between buying a Base Station 
radio - that can handle hundreds of client radios, and a one IP/MAC 
address radio - for the client end. Both prices have come down rather 
dramatically, with client radios now below the magic 'consumer' $500 
price point. Which happens to be what I had to pay for a 1200 baud 
Hayes Micromodem back 15 years ago.

Now let me expand on what I have been saying. This is a technical 
speed-up. It is one that's been coupled by more companies jumping 
into the game. With more learned about the software/hardware 
required, and with more production. Significantly, companies are now 
getting gobbled up by bigger companies. This is happening as these 
larger companies - this includes the Ciscos and Nokia's and so on 
-have started to get into the wireless world. And some is unlicensed, 
but some is licensed, like MMDS and LMDS. Which opens the door to far 
cheaper 'backbone' IP links.

COOK Report: Craig McCaw has huge slices of that stuff.

Hughes: Yes, because you can make radios -  again, with very fast 
signal processors and so on - that operate in licensed spectrum, but 
get high rates of reliable, error corrected, reasonably secure, data 
communications. Up to 100Mbps.

COOK Report: And they're up into the high number of gigahertz frequency, right?

Hughes: It depends. MCI Worldcom bought up a whole lot of MMDS 
licenses. And they've come out of the 2.5 gigahertz to 2.7 range. 
That's not way up high. That's just above 2.4, which is unlicensed. 
And they're heading towards services that are still aimed at the 
corporate or business level and that get up into quite high speeds. 
Fixed, wireless networks.

Cisco Integrating Wireless and Wireline

Now here comes another recent development. Very, very significant. 
Cisco, a device-based company, manufacturer of routers par excellence 
ends up doing several things. It buys Aironet for $880 million. This 
is all in the last 60 days. They're getting into the wireless LAN 
market at that level. The necessary radios are down below $1,500 and 
with PCMIA cards down below $200 in cost. Aironet has made some 
changes since then, however.  They have dropped the power of their 
radios to 30 miliwatts which is more appropriate for wireless LANs 
than ISPs.  While you could still stick an amplifier on the antenna, 
doing so raises your costs.  They have momentarily ceased production 
presumably prior to getting revved up again in their Cisco corporate 
guise.

COOK Report: Do the Aironet radios speak TCP/IP perfectly well?

Hughes: Oh, yes, perfectly well. Most of these spread spectrum no 
license radios are transparent to the protocol moving over them. But 
also, at the same time, Cisco itself comes out and announces an LMDS 
radio that'll operate 30 miles, cost $20,000 each end, but goes DS3, 
45 megabits per second 30 times faster than a T-1. So there's a radio 
in the licensed area and that radio is out in the marketplace right 
now. The point is that the DS3 LMDS radio is integrated into and part 
of an extension of their wireline routers. Lots of integration is 
done in software. They're software experts. They can use the crunch 
capability of their router knowledge and software knowledge to drive 
the hardware that's already released. I have recently been briefed by 
them. They have some very interesting things up their sleeve. And 
they are not a communications service company, they are a company 
which makes devices - that communicate. If Cisco does things right it 
could represent a big paradigm shift from the Telco Model of business.

Now, remember, there are the no-licensed spread spectrum bands around 
915 megahertz, and 2.4 and 5.8 gigahertz. But the FCC also came out 
with the UNII band.

COOK Report: That was about two years ago?

Hughes: Closer to 3 years. Now there are radios being made also in 
the 5.8 gigahertz UNII no-license bands that do not require spread 
spectrum.

COOK Report: At a 5.8 gig?

Hughes: It's the same thing. They overlap, as a matter of fact. In 
other words, the two band's services overlap, but that's normal in 
the FCC Part 15 frequency bands.

COOK Report: Aren't they severely artificially limited in their range?

Hughes: You put your finger on it, I've been screaming about this 
from the day it started. And you could only use one full watt of 
power in a UNII radio if you built a radio that offered 20 megabits 
of throughput. But then the FCC, always fretting about potential 
interference, imposed a formula for spectral density, whereby if you 
choose to make a radio that's only 10 megabits per second, or 5 or 
1.544 - T-1 speed in the UNII bands, you must lower the power 
accordingly. And so every way you do it, the range of a UNII radio is 
not going to exceed five miles. The laws of physics still hold true. 
And that's okay for a lot of uses. But its lousy for anything really 
rural, or even school districts which are spread off across cities. 
Yet the UNII band was touted as having 'solved' the connectivity 
problem for and between public schools. My NSF studies show that no 
license radios need to have ranges of between 10 and 15 miles if they 
are to serve even 90-95% of all public school districts. Not 5 miles.

Cisco is bringing out UNII radios. They're going to be pretty low 
cost at the client end - perhaps from $500 to $750 at the beginning, 
and they're going to have other people, like Motorola manufacture the 
end users' radios, while they manufacture the main base engine at 
home, in Cisco. So my problem, which few others have expressed, is 
that the UNII technical radio manufacturing restrictions the FCC 
imposed are too limiting for rural use, where interference is not the 
main problem, distance of link is. The very places the President is 
citing as having a huge 'digital divide' - affordable rural 
connectivity to the Internet.

COOK Report: Clarify for me what you meant when you said $500 to $750 
on the client end.  In other words, a base station is, what, point to 
multi-point, which is more expensive and more costly than the end 
user device?

Hughes: Yes the base station is much more sophisticated, of course. 
You could even take a PCMIA card and have it talk to another PCMIA 
card. Period. But the minute you put a second card, two cards talking 
to one, then you have to have what's called a base radio, or an 
access point. That's essentially the generic term for it. An access 
point is the point at which multiple radios talk to one radio and 
then presumably out the back of that access radio, your traffic goes 
into some network by either 10BaseT or 100Mbps Ethernet. Or, as the 
way LANs work, by moving traffic back out via radio to another 
computer on the LAN, through standard hubs.

In the Aironet line, for example, is the BR500, which 11 
megabits-per-second radio and operates in the 2.4-2.483 gigahertz 
band. It can theoretically have over a thousand connections to it. Of 
course you are sharing its bandwidth. But that is no different from a 
hundred workstations on a wired LAN sharing a T-1 pipe to the 
Internet. Except this radio operates much faster, at least 3-5 times 
the throughput of a T-1. The BR500 radio itself lists at $2,400. But 
the end user radios, which can be a PCMIA card, can be as low as 
$165. And with a 'pigtail' that permits an outside antenna. One 
client radio talking to the point-to-multi-point radio. So there is 
usually a base radio - an access point - and a number of client 
radios, usually called bridges. They differ in price.

Now, another one of the advances that have been made is that that 
BR500 not only can be an access point radio, it can be configured as 
a relay radio. You don't have to have a different radio, as you did 
with the early BreezeComs. Meaning if you can't reach your 
destination because of non-line of sight problems or distance, you 
can put one BR500 at the base, one BR500 out ten miles and another 
one another ten miles or over the mountain. You can have 20, 30, 40 
miles with one or two 'hops' using that same radio at every point. 
Moreover, that same radio can be logged into by password protected 
telnet or a web browser. They can have IP addresses in them. Even a 
crude router. You can use a web tool not to just configure, but also 
to monitor the wireless network, remotely, even if the radios are in 
a box high on an outside tower.

COOK Report: In other words, the newer radios come with a 
user-friendly GUI interface that will allow you to set it up in your 
own network of multiple radios?

Hughes: That's correct. I use these myself, in my own ISP operation. 
I originally replaced my T-1 connection to my upstream provider, 3 
miles away in downtown Colorado Springs, with three Breezecom 3mbps 
half duplex (making them effectively the same as T-1) radios. Three 
radios because there is a large office building blocking a good line 
of sight between our building in Old Colorado City and a 14 story 
office building downtown Colorado Springs, where a number of ISP 
backbone providers are. So I set up a relay point, which, because 
Breezecom's Access Point/Bridge radio designs, I had to use the AP 
radio at the relay point. That was fine for 2 years, rain or shine. 
But then, as things grew and newer radios came out, I replaced the 
Breezecoms with 11 mbps Aironets, and simply 'configured' one of them 
as a relay radio.

Now, I can log into that radio that's up the street or up a tower. I 
don't have to climb the tower. I can log into it, I can monitor it. 
And when Qwest had an outage yesterday for four hours, I was able to 
ping all three of my radios and then finally the Cisco router, all of 
which responded that there was nothing wrong on my end, caused by a 
wireless outage. So when I called Qwest's network operation center, I 
knew the problem was theirs, not mine.

Then, inside my ISP offices, we have the usual wired LAN network 
between our servers and router. And we have a number of business 
customers in the same building where we are.  These customers wanted 
higher speed connections to the net than dial up.  They can't get 
DSL, don't like ISDN, and would have to pay, each of them, over 
$1,500 a month for a US West-MCI/Sprint/Quest network connections. We 
merely ran 10BaseT connections to them through ceiling tiles, and 
sell them a fast connection from $35 a month for just the link to the 
outside, to $55 a month for that plus full ISP service - email, web 
space, shell or net accounts on our server.

Now, since I want to be connected from my home-office, we have 
another set of radios, from Wi-Lan of Canada, 915Mhz frequency 
hoppers that deliver T-1 speed to me in my house. Free. And to the 
History Center, and its web site. And to another home-office. Then 
inside my house I use an older generation 'only' one mbps wireless 
LAN to my laptops. For use anywhere in or around my house, like out 
on my porch, smelling the flowers. While running my business. And 
connecting at the lowest speed of one mbps.

But here is another point. The Breezecoms are still in use! For a 
business with several workstations, in another building close by, 
wanted a minimum one Mbps connection. I installed the Breezecoms to 
link the two buildings to my net. So now I have four different radio 
brands connected by hubs and 10BaseT cabling to the same Wide Area 
Network in Old Colorado City. The moral of the story is that radios 
can be reused easily in different places. Lots different from yanking 
out wires or fiber.

And I am able, sitting at home, on a wireless LAN, to log into my 
Aironet radios, check the status, see how many packets it's sending, 
what the error rates are, or change the radio rates, set up separate 
wireless channels for groups of radios to operate in, within the 
total allocated spectrum, permitting sub or parallel nets. Check for 
retries, error correcting, messaging, and many other configurations. 
In short, all but the very lowest cost, and earlier - 3 years ago - 
spread spectrum radios have gotten very 'smart.' The era of the 
smart, self configuring radio, has arrived.

So the large companies are buying up smaller, successful wireless 
companies. And that's giving the whole industry credibility. And 
that's also what's getting the interest of Wall Street. Because when 
a Cisco or a Lucent and so on starts to buy up smaller companies that 
are successful, it's a very clear signal then they're getting into 
the wireless game. Whether it's licensed services on a monthly basis 
or whether it's unlicensed. Radically different from Telephone 
companies buying them up, to just put them into the tired old central 
office, per minute cost, circuit switched telephone business model.

This is all, of course, a relatively recent phenomenon. And while 
there's something in the neighborhood of 7,000 ISP's in the U.S., the 
fact is that hundreds of them now are delivering wireless services.

Wireless ISPs

COOK Report: Well, I heard you estimate about 300?

Hughes: That's just an estimate. There was a hard number of 180 
months and months ago, but the increase is evident. It may be a 
thousand by now. Nobody's counting. I am watching it on a daily basis 
on the wireless ISP mail list. [Editor's Note: the list address is 
isp-wireless@isp-wireless.com and as we went to press with this 
article we were told that Breezecom, alone, now claims to be selling 
to 500 ISPs in North America].

I have been reading the wireless list for a long time, I'm seeing, on 
an almost daily basis, somebody new to the list saying, well, I'm an 
ISP and I want to offer wireless service. Or I want to start offering 
next month wireless ISP service from scratch. What do I need to know?

COOK Report: And they're talking a wireless service meaning 
connecting to an upstream wireless or allowing users to connect to 
them via wireless?

Hughes: No, both. Starting with users. And some of those have started 
out, of course, by aiming at business. And government and schools and 
so on.

COOK Report: It becomes another way to crack the local loop.

Hughes: Oh, definitely. It is absolutely a local loop issue. A large 
number of them are in pretty awkward locations. They're in rural 
areas where we're talking about towers for the radios.

COOK Report: And right now, we are talking local loop broadband, 
which as of two years ago, we weren't

Hughes: That is exactly right. Right now you have a lot of people 
looking at WaveSpan. UNII band. You can buy their Stratum 20 radio 
that goes 20 megabits per second UNII for about five miles and they 
maintain it can go more than that. [Editor's Note: Wave Span was 
acquired by Proxim in December 1999.] But, you can upgrade that radio 
to a Stratum 100 at 100 megabits per second. There are a couple of 
other companies which claim products in the area as well.

Well, that's significant enough that I immediately referred the San 
Diego Supercomputer center folks to that. Because they had an 
immediate, obvious need for it. The Cooperative Association for 
Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) has to move its offices a mile away 
from the high speed network links at the Center. CAIDA needs high 
bandwidth for its network research. PacBell, could only talk to them 
maybe about a DS3, but you damn well know what telco DS3's cost. And 
two would be horrendous for small operation needs really fast 
bandwidth.

So the 100 meg radios are here. Most of them in the UNII band. Thus 
limited. But the FCC is also opening its mind, because there's 
pressure now being put on from many, many directions. In fact, 
there's proceedings taking place right now in which the widening of 
more bandwidth even at the 2.4 gigahertz, is a possibility. And there 
are big companies and it's controversial. Because a lot of people 
think the little guy's going to get squashed. But with Cisco in the 
game we are talking now about even bigger companies. And there are 
now proposals at the FCC for ultra-wide bands.

COOK Report: Ultra-wide band meaning?

Hughes: Ultra-wide band means wider than the current no-license bands 
that are permitted for various no-license radios. In fact, there is 
an ultra-wide band - you got to be real careful of the terms here - 
that means low power and ultra-wide to some. And no less than the 
engineering staff of Paul Allen's Interval Corporation, filed with 
the FCC. Their filing basically recommended that the band cut across 
all bands. And cut across television and FAA and everything else. 
[Editor's note: on April 21, 2000 Paul Allen announced through his 
Vulcan Ventures holding company that he has closed Interval Research 
Corp after eight years of pursuing advanced research. Approximately 
30 of the staff will be offered an opportunity to join a newly formed 
Allen venture, which will focus purely on advanced development for 
Vulcan's broadband-oriented portfolio companies. ]

COOK Report: Because spread spectrum is so good that it can just, it 
can do its thing and not interfere with others?

Hughes: They used Paul Shepherd's MIT thesis in which he 
mathematically demonstrated millions of radios in Manhattan, not 
interfering with each other, and passing hundred's of megabits per 
second, with radios, architecture, and of course FCC rules, to permit 
it. Signal processing, it isn't just spread spectrum, spread 
spectrum's almost a passe name now. But the idea is still, across 
many frequencies, sharing with other emitters and receivers, very low 
power - sometimes below the 'background noise' level in the area, and 
digitally processed.

So there are a whole series of proposals at the FCC taking place and 
some are being brought in by some pretty substantial companies. For 
example, the MMDF by MCI Worldcom, who spent $400 million getting 
frequencies in the 2.5 to 2.7 giga hertz range. Their Warped One 
would be a 1.5 megabit, a T-1, for $300 to $600 a month. But the 310 
would be, called Warp 310, $40 a month for 300 KBS. MCI Worldcom, 
using licensed MMDS is talking about consumer level now and about 
direct competition with DSL and cable.

COOK Report: You have the continual slow movement of the RBOC's on 
DSL and, I think, the growing perception that DSL service is just 
going to degrade, the more DSL's you have on your copper loop from 
the central office. The Bell-headed telcos not doing a terrific job 
of rolling DSL out. The current AT&T/TCI strategy and now the 
AOL-Time Warner strategy for broadband access via cable TV is bogged 
down in controversy. Consequently, it begins to look like the shine 
on both DSL and cable TV as a broadband mechanism for TCP/IP is 
looking rather tarnished.

Hughes: You're absolutely right. Remember that DSL, is based upon the 
central office locations and an investment of about $150,000 to get a 
DSLAM into each central office. This is according to figures that I 
have heard directly from COVAD. And then, regardless of the overload, 
you start out running into another problem. As you get out toward 
Edge City, Suburbia, the size of the market starts dropping. And then 
you get into rural and small towns. Well, when it really starts 
dropping, then there's a crossover point where DSL is just not 
economic. Most of rural America will just never see it.

COOK Report: If you're looking at wireless for the lower cost issue 
or the issue of more or less immediate competition to cable and DSL 
for broadband into local loop, how important are line-of-sight issues 
with some of those radios?

Hughes: It's very important. However, it's interesting that Cisco, as 
part of their marketing, even on the frequency they're using for 
LMDS, maintains that they have developed technologies that limit 
severely the line of sight problem. In other words, diminish the 
problem technically.

Line of Sight and the Fresnel Zone

And one of them is called the Fresnel Zone. The Fresnel Zone is the 
fact that Radio waves when they travel from radio A to radio B, 
travel in kind of an elliptical envelope. So depending on the 
frequency, depending on the range, you have to have so much clearance 
above intervening obstacles, or from the ground at where your radio 
antenna is located.

I'll give a very, very specific example that I was involved with, 
down in the San Luis Valley. There was a tower that was down close to 
San Luis, which was down in a depression, with a ridge up above it. 
>From the top of that ridge - and from San Luis to the top of the 
ridge is only a half a mile, maximum. But from the ridge top it's 30 
miles line-of-sight to downtown Alamosa. It's a clean laser-light 
shot there.

The tower that we wanted to use was down on the shoulder of the ridge 
just above San Luis but only peeping over the top of the ridge to 
Alamosa, 30 miles away. By having a surveyor go up on the ridge and 
checking it, we found out that there was only ten feet of clearance 
from the top of the tower looking over the ridge line-of-sight to 
Alamosa. Well, it was line-of-sight from the top of the tower and it 
was line-of-sight down ten feet, but no further.

Fresnel Zone calculations for that radio at that range and at that 
frequency say you want 50 feet of clearance. And as a consequence, 
when, getting up on the tower, we put up a standard radio there, we 
found that it would not connect, because a big chunk of its power was 
diffused by hitting the ground before it went all the way. And yet, 
standing on the ridge at ground level with the same radio, with a 
handheld yagi antenna, with the same power, where the ground dropped 
away in front of you - obviously down about 50 feet, we got a good, 
30 mile connection. Consequently the only way to get around that was 
to go to higher power. Because we were an NSF funded experiment, we 
were able to get a waiver to do higher power. According to Cisco, 
they are now able to handle up to 49% blockage by the Fresnel Zone 
and still get through. So, technically, they say they have basically 
overcome some of the line-of-sight problems.

COOK Report: But with some of these radios, if you're talking about 
using them to get a broadband connection from residential homes to an 
ISP, you presumably would have to have that ISP radio attached to an 
antenna on the roof of its building. You would also quite possibly 
have to have an antenna on the roof of your house? In other words, if 
there's trees in the way, that's going to hurt also?

Hughes: You cannot generalize about things like trees. Because it all 
is a function of frequency, effective power and range and the nature 
of the obstacles. And that cannot be generalized about. So one of the 
fundamental realities of wireless, no matter what it is and where it 
is, is you must have a professional site survey before you buy and 
install the radios. That is unavoidable.

COOK Report: That's still the case, even with the better interfaces, and so on?

Hughes: Yes, because you're basically measuring RF signal strength 
Fresnel Zone obstacles. The trees, deciduous trees are not the same 
thing as pine trees. Wet trees are not the same thing as dry trees. 
Dense trees are not the same thing as sparse trees. Trees with snow 
hanging on the branches are not the same thing as branches in a 
snowstorm - when a properly sited radio will work just fine. Both 
through snow and rain.

COOK Report: That web site picture with the great gobs of snow on 
your trees, by the way, was a good visual. That picture was worth 
10,000 words.

Hughes: That, of course, is it. It even blocked my little half a mile 
signal that's six-tenths of a watt from a Canadian Wi-Lan Radio. A 
good radio that is up 99.9% of the time, rain or shine over the past 
year.

COOK Report: That snow on the trees was like pulling down a window 
shade between you and the ISP.

Hughes: Yes, that's why unless you use a professional installer, you 
better learn a lot about how radio waves work. It's not rocket 
science. Certainly no harder than configuring Routers and Servers. 
Just different. And if distances are short, and you have good radios, 
you can do lots of rule of thumb work. The Aironet radio has software 
that permits you to walk around with a laptop and see, visually, the 
margin of connectivity power you have between points, with different 
antennas. Its the long reaches, when people try to get that last 
mile, out of 25, that takes skill.

Special Skills Needed by the Wireless ISPs

Hughes: Exactly right. And so you have that. So there are 
companies... in fact, a great deal of the discussion on the ISP list 
is about what does it take in distance and so on with given radios 
and how do you get around it? There's a guy in Texas who is superb on 
the subject of installations. His name is Jaime Solorza. 
915-778-5966. And ask for Jaime.

The point is, they are installers. They are resellers. They are site 
surveyors. They do an enormous amount of business and they really 
know this stuff from top to bottom. And you can ask him any of these 
questions, but also you can even ask him for some good examples that 
he would know of there.

COOK Report: For example, I'm getting the impression that if you've 
got an ISP in a city of a couple of hundred thousand population and 
it's sort of semi-rural you have to have specialists. Or even if your 
ISP is in a city of 500 or a million population, that ISP either has 
to have, among its own employees or with a partnership company, 
someone who can do this kind of survey if it wants to advertise for 
wireless customers.

Hughes: Yes, on the initial set up. But it depends upon the skills of the ISP.

COOK Report: In what sense?

Hughes: Now, who are ISP's? Well, these are people who can handle 
Linux or Sun machines and IP and routers and so on. You've got to 
have that in your organization. But the ISP technical people must 
also learn the radio work. Siting and installation doesn't take an RF 
Engineering degree, but it does take some rigorous stuff, so there's 
lots of talk about spectrum analyzers and so on and rules of the 
thumb. I'm experienced enough so that I can take a look at your 
set-up and I can usually tell you whether it'll work or not. And if 
not what it would take to make it work. Know who the best friends of 
local ISPs can be? Ham radio operators. They may know little spread 
spectrum well - even though there is an entire branch of Hams, TAPR 
who specialize in digital radio - but they sure know antennas, and 
wave propagation and reception. And even local laws and ordinances 
about placing antennas and towers or masts.

While the U.S. rule is a maximum of one watt of power at the radio 
(much of Europe limits it to 100 milli-watts) and then there are 
rules for maximum permitted antenna gain, what's called the EIRP, the 
effected radiated power. And then there's a whole science in 
antennas. And there are rules about how much total effective 
radiation you can have, radio power plus antenna gain. One watt at 
902megahertz is going to go a lot further and through a lot more 
interference than at 2.4 gigahertz with the same power. A good 
example was the Mongolian installation that my CO-PI Dewayne 
Hendricks did. Because the Mongolian Engineers hadn't answered our 
questions about buildings in Ulaanbaatar, and what you could see from 
their downtown building roof - we asked for a video tape - before 
Dwayne arrived in Mongolia, we weren't sure whether we were going to 
have outside antennas on every one of those seven sites

Well, it turns out the Russians didn't put steel bars in a damn lot 
of those concrete buildings. And so up to about 3 kilometers, there 
was no requirement for an external antenna, because the 902mhz signal 
went through the walls to the little rubber duck antennas on the 1 
watt. FreeWave serial port radios. Had there been metal in those 
walls, that wouldn't have been the case. And we had to guess when we 
shipped thousands of dollars worth of associated gear and antennas 
besides the radios. We would be there for just 10 days - no time for 
later shipment. Because we were experienced and had a little luck, we 
guessed right.

But this doesn't always mean that you've got to go up to the roof to 
get more range than a rubber duck antenna can give you. It can also 
mean that you have a little flat antenna just outside the window. Or 
a directional antenna, even inside the building, that concentrates 
the power and so may make the difference between success and failure. 
One of my NSF projects was 'Local History by Wireless' in which I put 
an NT web server in the computer room of an old church building, now 
a museum for an historical society, and connected it up 3/4 of a mile 
- through trees and even a big brick building - wirelessly 
<http://history.oldcolo.com>.

An inside ground floor antenna would not connect. An outside yagi 
antenna on the roof of an historically restored church would look 
incongruous. So I put in the attic, above the insulation blankets, 
but directional. An 18dbi gain yagi. It worked, and is still working 
2 years later. Radios are as much an art as a science.

So there's lots of ways to adjust things, but that's part of the site 
survey. It's experimentation, or it is on a big network, it's really 
a professional thing. And the larger companies, like Solectek if 
you're going to buy a whole network for a company in a town that may 
have six branch offices around town will send out an RF engineer, who 
first of all does a path analysis with software. I have a piece of 
software that costs $1,100. It basically takes into account the 
terrain, from U.S.G.S map sheets, range and then applies frequency 
calculations. It will give you the calculations that get you really 
close. From that point on, it's Reality Time, and you do what needs 
to be done on site.

COOK Report: So of the 300 to 500 wireless ISP's, are most of them 
connecting mainly a few small businesses?

Hughes: Yes, most ISPs offering wireless, offer it to businesses 
first. So they can learn from it, among other things. And expand from 
there. Until Teletronics came out with their WLAN product line, with 
end user radios as low as $100, the radio cost was too stiff for 
residential connectivity. And as these companies learned, by putting 
little connectors on even the PC Card radios, so external antennas 
could be connected, it becomes more and more possible to connect 
economically to home owners, and profitable for the ISP. At rates 
equal to or above dedicated telco services, or DSL, or cable. 
Bypassing them all.

There's a whole range of companies including a large one in Utah that 
specializes in providing high speed connections to large businesses, 
in direct competition with U.S. West. In many places wireless is the 
only direct competition with the telcos. I wish Congress and the FCC 
understood that. They flap their lips about 'competition' and about 
'the digital divide' - then virtually ignore a whole emerging 
industry under their noses, while trying to regulate older 
technologies.

Wireless Business Models

COOK Report: What are the wireless ISP business models? Three flavors 
perhaps? ISP's that are using wireless to get to their upstream, 
might be one; ISP's that are using wireless to connect businesses and 
business offices to each other and to the ISP in place of leased 
lines would be another. And then is there a third where ISP's, if you 
want to have a radio in your home and you're just an individual user, 
who are beginning to do that, that's probably the most recent and the 
fewest?

Hughes: Yes, but that's not a very good characterization. Because, 
there's a totally different problem going upstream than going 
downstream. If you're in a big city, there's very little advantage, 
if you're doing really high bandwidth to be going wireless up to that 
upstream ISP. The real opportunity is to be found wireless in 
delivery that last mile or that last five miles. Or between two small 
towns, or suburbs.

So you can't really generalize on it. But for small towns, it's a 
killer, because your cost of a small town ISP is not simply getting 
down to your customers, your cost is also getting up to the larger 
city and wireless becomes very significant there - it's called 
microwave. And microwave is up to 100 megabits per second now. And 
microwave costs have come down. And so licensed microwave, which work 
pretty damn well when you're pushing this 50 mile range, is sometimes 
the method of choice to get from your town to a larger city.

COOK Report: But if you're 20 or 10 miles or something like that and 
you can go line of sight, then there's some other high speed radios 
that are pretty good.

Hughes: Right. Cisco has an LMDS radio that can do up to 30 miles, 
line of sight at 45 megabits. Also Jaime Solorza would be a good one 
to ask this question, because remember the thing I got into with 
Texas versus the FCC. That the FCC, as you know, has this god awful 
rule, involving the e-rate. Because the rule in e-rate is that the 
school cannot, or the library, cannot own the equipment. That is they 
cannot buy either the microwave equipment or even a satellite ground 
station (they're never cheap) or a pair of radios using e-rate funds. 
And provide their own connection between their building, or to the 
upstream ISP. Dumbest damn decision the FCC ever made.

COOK Report: That's just absurd.

Hughes: Well, it's absurd because it's expensive. And it's absurd 
because it's forced the schools into an annual recurring cost 
contractual arrangement with telcos, even though it's subsidized 
cost. If and when the Congress decides to kill that program, they're 
all going to be standing there holding the bag with their 
infrastructure built around that annual cost set up. The telephone 
companies are laughing all the way to the bank.

Now, today, for example, in the San Luis Valley is a good case, the 
30-40 or more miles in the rural areas still have a $2,000 a month 
local loop charge for even a T-1. And with yet the radios now exist 
that down in the San Luis Valley, we could go on top of that ridge 
and we could easily be going five megabits per second true throughput 
for that 30 mile distance and down to that school. Doing this would 
cut out, totally, the $2,000 a month local loop bill for that school 
district. And the district would then pay only for the five megabit 
per second Internet bandwidth cost from the ISP, or the ISP and the 
school district could agree to 'choke down' their bandwidth to say, 
T-1, and pay less. Like maybe $1,200 a month. Now, its $2,000 a month 
to the telco PLUS $1,200 to the upstream ISP. Or $3,200 a month to 
the school district that is 40 miles away from the big city. Buy a 
pair, or even three, $500 2mbps radios, which incur a one time cost 
of less than one month of telco connectivity (which still requires 
that you buy a DSU to connect to them), you suddenly are down to 
$1,200 a month. That's the comparative economics of wireless.

And remember also that many ISP's have awakened to this, partly as a 
result of being approached by their customer, where the customer owns 
a pair of radios. The customer provides the extension from the 
business to the premises of the ISP, not the other way around. It's a 
very smart thing to do, because then you own a pair, you could take 
them wherever you want. And all you're doing is getting permission 
from the ISP or the building owner that they're in. That, of course, 
is what I did with Colorado Supernet 3 years ago - permission to put 
the antenna in there and the radio in there. Because of this 10 Base 
T general method, you're handing the ISP an RJ45 to connect directly 
into his router. He's not paying the phone company to come back to 
you! So the upstream Internet carrier is paying less too! 
Consequently, they charged me less.

So there is that absurd FCC level decision on the e-rate. You better 
believe I had that on my mind when I was invited to speak before the 
Texas Infrastructure Fund which is a Texas version of the national 
E-rate. And it was set up on the same principle. It comes out of 
rate-payers pockets and goes into a $1 billion, ten-year fund. 
Managed at the state level. And it was for subsidy of schools, 
libraries and, in the Texas case particularly, health centers.

All right. The rule was, before I made my speeches to them, that you 
had to have a service. If you were in Cut and Shoot, Texas, 40 miles 
outside of Houston, you had to use the phone company. And if that 40 
miles cost $2,000 a month, that's it. You'd get the subsidy out of 
that fund of $2,000 a month until the end of time. And then once 
you're inside Cut and Shoot, there's the separate issue of how you 
distribute the T-1 signal, even between buildings of a company or 
buildings of a health center, like clinics, or the library or the 
school or all of the above. More monthly telephone line costs.

So I went down there to Austin, and showed the Infrastructure Fund 
what it could do with wireless.  I said, for god's sakes, if you 
Texans have any brains, you'll change your rules from the way 
Washington and the FCC does it. They changed the rule. They may be 
Texans, but they aren't rubes when it comes to dollars and cents. And 
it's a very nice formula. The formula is, since it's based upon the 
phone company subsidy, essentially, if a T-1 from the ILEC or CLEC, 
is going to cost $2,000 a month, they normalize it to T-1, to Cut and 
Shoot, or from wherever. You multiply the monthly figure by 12 and 
you get $24,000. And you add to it any cost of equipment that you'd 
have to have under the T-1. For example a DSU, CSU, or whatever.

You cowboys in Cut and Shoot may now apply all of that to an 
alternate means of connectivity. And it can be no license wireless, 
it can be licensed MSDS wireless, it could be microwave. And $24,000 
will buy one hell of a lot of radio delivered bandwidth, both to the 
town and within it. Even relay points and everything else. And then 
you're only left paying for the upstream ISP. But as you know, an 
upstream ISP in many cases is not necessarily a commercial ISP. It 
may be a government. It may be a university. That's a very common 
thing.

As a result in Texas, any school, library, or health center, now has 
an alternative to continue paying monthly-telco bills with the sole 
future prospect of rate hikes and unending dependence on the telcos.. 
Would that Washington would get that smart. But then one has the 
feeling that the politicians are so cozy with the Telcos, they can't 
see over their shoulder to the Wireless Future, which is gaining on 
them fast.

Flexibility from Extreme Low Power and Antennas

There's one other thing I'd better say in between this. In the 2.4 
gigahertz area almost everybody makes radios that only operate with 
100 milli-watts of power. One-tenth of one watt, or one-tenth the 
authorized power by the FCC.

COOK Report: And why do they make at only a tenth of a watt?

Hughes: Because it's cheaper. It's much costlier to make a one watt 
radio. And they can sell the same radio in Europe, where the rule is 
100 milli-watts everywhere. So they make their base radio that way 
because there are now many companies making amplifiers to put on line 
between the back of the radio and the antenna. And YDI, Young 
Designs, in the D.C. area, is one of the best of them. And almost 
every company now makes amplifiers. You put the amplifier between the 
radio and the antenna. If a radio puts out 100 milli-watts, you add a 
1/2 watt amplifier, you are still inside FCC rules, and you can get 
longer range. So, again, one way to solve the problem of connectivity 
range or interference by trees and so on, is if you can't get through 
at one-tenth of one watt, you then buy a plug-in amplifier to bring 
you up to a full watt.

Now, I have no amplifiers on my three systems. I don't need them. I 
get perfect connection, because the distance is not that great. I'm 
not fighting anything. But if I were fighting something, I would take 
the $750 Young Design's 2.4 gig one watt amplifier. You can buy up to 
a one watt amplifier on a 2.4 gig radio. And you're still inside of 
the FCC rules. So amplification is becoming a very popular solution 
to the difficult site, the long site, the one in which the radios, 
even with good antennas, don't do the best job.

COOK Report: But you still can't use an amplifier to exceed the FCC limits.

Hughes: That's right. But on the other hand, these radios are so damn 
good that you're talking about 20 miles with one-tenth of one watt. 
And a pair of the lowest cost radios have been measured at almost 70 
miles with line amplifiers. All within FCC rule. It works. Its legal, 
It's reliable. And it's secure. And it's free, free, free. Who needs 
Ma Bell for bandwidth?

COOK Report: I hear you.

Hughes: Well, do you know how far some have gone? When I was in San 
Diego, I talked to Frank Vernon, a geophysicist who works with Scrips 
Oceanographic Institute. Vernon is a seismologist. He monitors 
earthquake data. He's got a huge bunch of three-way radios that are 
coming back up to towers and so on. But he flat said, out loud, in 
front of an audience of high end scientists, without amplification, 
he's got one watt FreeWave radios going 100 kilometers. I keep 
running across some pretty long stretches. 70 miles. 50 miles. Their 
performance is a function, within the rules, of the height, the clear 
air and, if necessary, and an amplifier in there.

Software Defined Smart Radios

COOK Report: So what are they doing at the FCC?

Hughes: There's a Notice of Inquiry out and it will be discussed next 
week at the recently formed FCC Telecommunciations Advisory Council - 
TAC. - The NOI is brand new and that is on the subject of a Software 
Defined Radio (SDR). One where smart software controls the radio - 
its power, its frequency spread, and other technical characteristics.

That's what Dewayne and I recommended back in April of '98 in our 
Scientific American article. We must permit the manufacture of smart 
radios which set their frequencies. And set their own power levels. 
Keeping the power to the minimum. It's a very, very important idea. 
We are moving away from the idea that radios have to be dumb and 
fixed and made for one set of emission rules. The radios now can be 
smart, intelligent and self-regulating, like the Internet. But that's 
another way to get not only more bang for the buck, but also to 
minimize interference in congested areas.

If you have smart radios, built to FCC specifications so the 
'self-regulation' really works, then the FCC could raise the power 
rules! To 10, 20 watts! Then in the really rural areas, where 
distance is the problem, but where interference in those bands is 
minimal or non-existent, they could run full power - 20 watts, with 
higher gain antennas. 50, 100, 250 miles. But at shorter distances 
and in urban areas where interference is, or can be, a problem, the 
radios set themselves to, say, a quarter watt. Cause that's all they 
need! But it has to be approved by the regulators, the FCC, which is 
way behind the power curve on approving these new possibilities. 
Maybe the recent creation of the Telecommunications Advisory Council 
to the FCC will help speed up change. My colleague Dewayne Hendricks 
is on it. And he is doing through his Dandian company on the island 
of Tonga, in the South Pacific. There, as they strive to link 
hundreds of islands, the Crown Prince sets the spectrum rules, not 
the FCC.

I submit the principle of 'smart radios' (and smart antennas) is a 
very fundamental answer to lots of 'scarce spectrum' issues 
nationally, and internationally, when coupled with digitally massaged 
data across wide bands of spectrum. George Glider talks about these 
things theoretically. We are doing them in the field, practically.

And remember that most of these radios also have sub channels that 
you can jump to. That's one way that they can it make so that 
everybody doesn't have to be in the same sub set. For example, in the 
Freewave radio, you can have 15 different settings within 902 to 
928Mhz. And what does that mean? That means you can have this radio 
sitting here and communicating with a distant radio while you can 
place a radio right next to the first, operate it on the same general 
frequencies, and not have it interfere with the first radio.

Now, that can be set manually, of course, or they can even be set by 
being logged into. Now you're starting to talk about having about the 
little buggers scan their operating environment where they might find 
other Breezecoms in the area with some potential interference. Having 
done this, they make sure they do not interfere by setting themselves 
to operate in a different part of the authorized spectrum. And the 
FCC with the NOI (Notice of Inquiry, where it is asking 'the 
industry' to comment) has thrown the possibility  of a world with 
such capabilities out there. There's going to be a debate, both 
technical and regulatory, because technology that operates under 
these premises makes it possible change the very way that the FCC 
regulates spectrum.

It's not just the dumb hardware of the past, grand fathered in 
forever, and it's not just the fact that it's no license and it's 
spread spectrum. But now we're getting into the area with the 
software defined radios, where, if the FCC is smart, they will also 
shorten the life of licenses. Manufacturers must upgrade their 
capabilities or lose their certification for their unsold radios. For 
we know greater capabilities are coming along in software, radios, 
modulation, and antenna design. We are in an era of accelerating 
progress of digital radio design and operation.

COOK Report: Well, who are doing some of the offerings of the smart radios?

Hughes: Ask Jaime. I just don't memorize all the makes and models. 
There are at least 80 companies now, of radio manufacturers. He's in 
touch with damn near every one of them and he would be able to answer 
that real quick. Proxim just bought up one of these outfits -Wavespan 
but Proxim was already in this game. Research is going both ways, 
it's going into more powerful radios, but it's also going down to 
miniature radios.

Now, I put out a question all over the place - what's the smallest 
radio in the world? By god, I got answers. I got a reference to a Dan 
Withers up near Seattle and the organization is called 
www.worldwireless.com. I am now able to buy, a Freewave for $1,250. 
Oh, easy, up to 115 kilobits per second, serial. One watt. Frequency 
hopping. Really good radio. Very, very useful. But, whoa. I just 
ordered from old Dan Withers a kit, i.e., two radios, which are 56 
KB, one watt, almost everything else the same characteristics. Per 
radio  the cost is $335. And the combination is $700 for the kit, 
including all kinds of stuff. And you might get up as much as $500, 
but the fact is the pair of radios now can be bought, a serial, 
that'll do 56 KB or 115. For lots of uses that is plenty fast - 
certainly for the environmental scientists I work with, whose $3,000 
data loggers put out only 9,600 baud of data.

COOK Report: At what bandwidth or what range?

Hughes: Same range, it can go up to 30 miles or 40 miles. And being 
902-928 megahertz, punch through walls. Now we're talking about an 
end user radio inside one's house, serial. At the 902 to 928 range, 
frequency hopping stuff. But then there is Teletronics and their low 
cost 2mbps radios.

COOK Report: Well, a minute ago you said you get what you pay for. 
Have you tested it yet?

Hughes: You get what you pay for in the company and the support. And 
the total corporate follow through, ease of configuration, good 
documentation, best possible performance. And all those little 
diagnostic features.

COOK Report: So when you get the cheaper thing, you may be a little 
bit more on your own.

Hughes: A little bit more on your own, a little bit fewer return 
phone calls. But a whole mail list to ask questions on.

Customer Driven Advancement

Hughes: Yes and this leads to the concept that the end users can 
connect among themselves and then one of a connected group can link 
to an ISP. It's not all downstream.

COOK Report: Okay, because what evidence is there that, if I know the 
capabilities of doing these various and sundry things, and I know 
there is a Sprint Earthlink POP is in Trenton, New Jersey, near my 
house for example, I could knock on the door and ask them to let me 
connect? With these big national systems, there's no way in hell, 
with the commitment of any reasonable amount of my time they would 
agree to connect my radio. But what you are saying is that if the 
owner of a small ISP has a POP that you can reach on a reasonable 
basis and is aware of what can be done, even if he doesn't have a 
radio program yet, you can call him up and say, can I come in? You 
see the question I'm asking.

Hughes: That's exactly what I did with Colorado Supernet. Giant MCI 
would not let me do it, even though they are in the same building. 
They didn't have, or understand digital radios. I'm the one who went 
to them. They blew me off. So I went with Supernet. Now MCI keeps 
calling with me, pleading with me to look at their upstream prices. I 
blow them off now.

COOK Report: But when you go to them, do you make the argument that 
you should cooperate with me because even at some retail price base 
hook-up, I am not occupying local loop infrastructure to get into and 
out of your pop?

Hughes: Sure. That's part of the argument. You know what the other argument is?

COOK Report: What?

Hughes: Consider the ISP as captive to the telephone company. If the 
upstream ISP cooperates with you, you're essentially showing him how 
he may go into the wireless business by using your equipment for 
starters. And learn what it does. It's a cheap way for an upstream 
ISP to get some experience and exposure.

COOK Report: But you said there's a physical device that you can 
bring to him that is the receiving radio that he plugs in where?

Hughes: Into a garden variety Ethernet hub! The back side of the 
radio has an Ethernet port. Let me talk you through this. In my 
house, I have this laptop. And it's got a PC card in it that's 
wireless. One megabit per second. It's older. It cost $650 four years 
ago. I can do it now at 2mbps for $100 today. The PC card radio talks 
to an access point. Well, what the hell is the access point? It's 
nothing but a little white box into which an identical radio is 
plugged, like the one that goes to the PC cards. (Did you know that 
the much touted Apple Airport wireless is nothing more than Lucent 
wireless LAN cards in Apple's box?) But the only thing the box does, 
it turns the radio signal into an Ethernet signal. And it has a 10 
Base T female connector there. That's plugged down to this little 
$59, five port hub. Ethernet is Ethernet.

So, between the two radios, it's radio protocol. But down to that 
hub, it is Ethernet. Now, coming out of the hub beneath my desk is 
another Ethernet that plugs into the back of this Wi-lan radio, from 
Canada. Which goes up to the roof to a Yagi antenna. Which is pointed 
towards my office. When it gets to my office wirelessly, it comes 
down into another radio made by the same company and set to be point 
to multi-point. Meaning it comes to me, but it also points down to my 
son David's house, so he's got a connection. And to the History 
Center's radio. Three of us share a T-1 connection. Could be 15 of 
us, in the neighborhood. Heck, one early adopter could set up an omni 
antenna on his house, serve 5, 10, 20 neighbors with a 2mbps or 
faster connection, then turn around and connect to the upstream ISP 
wirelessly, and split the cost 20 ways. It could be cheaper than DSL 
or Cable, and go where they can't or won't.

802.11 Interoperability

So I've got three different brands of radios and they're all 
connected and they operate at different speeds - 1 meg, T-1 and 10 
megs per second. They're all normalized to an Ethernet. That's why 
it's not coincidental that the 10 meg is Ethernet speed. I could even 
go further. I could take one of these serial radios now and buy a 
little $40 connector that goes serial to Ethernet.

COOK Report: Go further?

Hughes: Meaning that it is not going to go Ethernet speed but it's 
going to go as fast as the serial port will let it. Either 56 KB or 
115. But there is a demand for lower speed radios, especially for 
these scientists and a lot of things, there's still a lot of serial 
stuff around. What I'm trying to get across here is, that you have 
inter connectability. It's all an extension of the LAN. And, of 
course, the 100 megabits is not accidental. That's 100 megabit LAN. 
So when you come in, you come out the back of the radio into your 
premises, you have 100 megabit LAN, you better have the 100 megabits, 
across that room to your router and so on to go upstream.

COOK Report: As long as we're talking about this topology, I had 
heard that it is the 802.11 standard that enables the radios to 
interoperate. I had heard that if I have a good connection in my 
house, I could connect up my neighbors to my house and then to the 
ISP?

Hughes: Yes. You took the words right out of my mouth, because I was 
about to say, and this little $150, two megabit per second 
Teletronics radio will talk to the $2,000 BR500 Aironet radio. The 
802.11 standard interconnects them! At 2mbps.

COOK Report: So if I had a $2,000 radio in my house, I could spread 
out a couple of dozen 2 megabit $100 radios throughout my 
neighborhood.

Hughes: You got exactly what the ISP's are doing.

COOK Report: Well, which ISP's?

Hughes: A whole bunch of them. For example Jason Simonds, Midcoast 
Wireless. 207-563-8080. See for example: 
http://www.midcoast.net/wirelessfaq.html ISP for Wireless ISP's he 
calls himself. Now, he is an ISP. And he is doing it. As I explained 
much earlier in this interview, I am doing it.

An ISP in Nome, Alaska, (www.nook.net) is doing it. He is operating a 
dial up ISP service in Nome, connected to the net via satellite. 
However, he took three FreeWave radios, attached one to his dial up 
server in Nome. He then placed a second radio with battery and solar 
power, as a relay  way up on a high mountain ridge 45 miles northeast 
of Nome.  Then 25 miles beyond the relay ridge lies the village of 
White Mountain. He took the third radio and attached it to a dial up 
serviver in the village. The relay radio on the ridge can see both 
Nome and Whitemountain. So he delivers a commercial 56kbps connection 
in Whitemountain, which gets to Nome for free, and goes from there to 
the net via satellite. He uses the radios to extend his connection at 
zero additionalcost to him and at a  rate of 56 kbs from Nome to 
White Mountain where he has paying customers. And makes a profit!

Now, a lot of this stuff is still done by hackers. Like those who ran 
the early Internet. And the earliest computer bulletin boards. Before 
AOL. Remember them? There's a woman in the wireless ISP mail list who 
is just so ingenious, she just drives me up the wall. But the fact 
is, I've been watching her ask all these questions, she acts like 
she's a dumb blond. But by god, she's running the thing and it's 
working. And she's not super high tech, but once again, where is the 
expertise coming from?

>From the mail list. E-mail. Talking to them. And there's expertise, 
obviously. You've got to do a lot of learning. Eight or nine years 
ago it was Ethernet. And routers. It was the whole evolution of the 
Internet as it migrated down. 5 years ago it was the Web, and HTML 
coding. Where the hell was the expertise in the early 1990s? Well, it 
was among the hackers at the bottom and they were on the ISP list. 
And they were talking routers. The point is, it's still in this - 
while it's serious stuff for a lot of ISP's and it's real business. 
The fact is there's a huge amount of innovation and entrepreneurship 
that's taking place in communications among wannabe wireless ISP's or 
ISP's that want to add wireless to their operations. And they are 
thumbing their noses at the telcos. And setting up services where no 
telco dares to go. Too unprofitable for such a behemoth.

COOK Report: Well, it's this same grass roots kind of stuff which 
served as the training ground for all the network engineers for the 
commercial services.

Hughes: You're exactly right.  There is really two layers to this. 
Cisco and the rest of the corporate world is coming down into this. 
For fixed wireless stuff. Either servers or like Cisco, to sell the 
thing and do it as a turnkey kind of set up operation. And you're 
having these grassroots ISP's coming up from the bottom. And they're 
not very small. I mean, you talk to Jaime and just ask him straight 
ahead what's his annual billings. I got a hunch this guy's got a hell 
of a growing company.

Coming from the Bottom Up

And these are in-between guys, these are not the ISP's themselves. 
They are resellers. But they're oh so much more than resellers. 
They're distributors and they're resellers and they are themselves 
expert in this stuff. And they go out and do the site survey. And 
Jaime's answering questions right and left at the same time he asks 
some, because this stuff is exploding in many directions.

For example, there's the issue already of throttling. This means that 
the ISP can adjust your radio to give you only 256 KB which you pay 
for. Even though your radio is capable of 10 megabits per second.

This allows the ISP to price to his customers' needs. Everybody 
doesn't need ten megabits per second. They don't want to pay for it. 
It's just like any ISP. You're paying for bandwidth, right?

COOK Report: So are you saying if I'm a distributor of radios that I 
can make some modifications to them?

Hughes: Well, not modifications to the radio. You can use software 
that runs in the Linux system, for example. Or in the router. Add-ons 
that give you the capability to both track but also to monitor, but 
also to set a maximum flow rate to any given customer.

COOK Report: Okay, in other words, if I'm paying for an upstream 
bandwidth connection, if I have a radio that can come in and go 10 
megabits and I want to put that on the guy's Ethernet, he doesn't 
want to give me the capability to suck up 10 megabits from his system.

Hughes: That's right. Because if the radio is capable of delivering 
ten megs to you, and he doesn't want to let you have the ten megs, 
because if he does, you will put a service on it. You will resell 
your connection to your neighbors. I'm doing that in Old Colorado 
City Communications. I could, if I wanted, spread my wireless ISP 
business all over 500,000 population Colorado Springs. But I have to 
spend half my time showing biological and environmental scientists, 
from those around the San Diego Supercomputer Center, to one Hispanic 
researcher studying frogs on the top of Mount Toro in Puerto Rico.

COOK Report: So on a small scale, you've put in your own infrastructure.

Hughes: Oh, absolutely. And have had it up for 30 months. And part of 
it is true wireless from me. I'm using the wireless. But things like 
throttling down, the ability to do that in software, there's another 
thing. There is already, for Linux (there must be for bigger ones), 
it's called EPPP. Ethernet PPP. Now you know how PPP works?

COOK Report: Yes.

Hughes: The ISP has a block from a Class B, he's got a block of 
numbers. And he's got X number of telephone lines, say he's got 25 
lines. So he has a block of maybe 30 IP addresses. But he has 8 
clients or 8 customers for every one of his 25 lines. Well, why do 
you have DHCP and PPP? So that when you dial in, it temporarily 
assigns you an IP address.

But, now there's EPPP which permits you to do that over the Ethernet. 
So I could have a wireless based DHCP, because right now, and I've 
learned about that on this list, because I basically for $5 a month, 
renting IP addresses from my fund of 256. And I've got them to rent, 
but at some point, I will run out. And so basically by having EPPP 
with the wireless, I can preserve my supply.

COOK Report: In other words you can take a subset of them and you can 
multiplex them amongst a larger group of customers.

Hughes: Yes. And with bandwidth throttling of wireless, you basically 
can price and measure what you do all the way up and down the line. 
That accounts for a whole lot of the innovation that's going on.

COOK Report: So at the grassroots, everybody, you can develop a whole 
mesh of interconnectedness of everybody connecting to everybody else.

Hughes: You betcha. Now, here's the telephone number and the guy you 
want to talk to, Michael Young, YDI, Young Designs. He's in Falls 
Church, Virginia. Telephone 703-237-9108. And he sells radios. He's 
unhappy that I bought Teletronics radios and not all from him. His 
radios are good, but they're a higher price. And I've been there and 
done that. But I have bought his amplifiers. They are better than 
Teletronics. Now he's measured some of these other things.

But, for me what is important is the fact that I was actually able to 
buy these things and get them up and get them going between two 
systems just lickety-split. It's almost getting to be plug-and-play. 
And that's from a little PC card that cost me $99 and I only paid 
$400 for the access point. Which could talk to multiple radios, at 2 
meg per second across the room.

And then go into the Ethernet hub. You see, that's the key. The key 
is that by going into either a 10 Base T Ethernet series or going 
into the 100 megabit level, you're plugged into a purely normal 
networking environment. There's no magical interface. And the radios 
can be modulated within that framework. So that's really what's been 
happening with wireless ISPs.


Part 2:
The NSF Field Science Research

Tachyon, Globalstar and Qualcomm

COOK Report: OK. Tell me how the NSF Field Science Project ties into 
all of this?

Hughes: There are two studies underway. One that is very, very 
significant I haven't talked much about. That's the satellite 
delivery of IP.

COOK Report: That ties with Tachyon into your recent San Diego 
Supercomputer Center meeting, doesn't it?

Hughes: Well, it does tie it in, but Tachyon is just one of them. The 
generalization is that, IP delivered right down to the individual by 
satellite is coming on eventually, with lots of services. Well, 
that's, okay. However, an intermediate step is being able to come 
down to the point in a metro area, and I don't care if it's a 
neighborhood center or a to business or to a school system, at such a 
rate of bandwidth that it is practical to distribute the signal 
laterally by no license wireless. Now that is one hell of a model if 
you think about it.

In other words, everybody thinks that the upstream ISP has got to be 
someplace downtown. But what happens when you are able to hook up at 
2 meg up, at 2 meg down into your little ISP operation, from a 
satellite, or your small business operation with four offices. Or 
with your school system. Or with your government office. And have 
your IP go straight to the net from a 1 meter dish aimed at a 
satellite, delivering standard IP packets. But then you reach your 
other offices or your clients laterally by wireless that also travels 
at a rate of at least 2 megabits per second. Out to 1, 5, 10, 20 
miles.

Tachyon so far is the only one doing this and Tachyon has its 
critics. But if they deliver what they promise who cares? They are 
just beginning to attach customers. They state that the customer 
ground station that talks to the satellite is only $5,000 and you can 
do bi-directional, true TCP/IP, at 2 megabits down and 256k up, for 
$2000 a month, or 300kbps down and 64k up, for $795.  This will 
include full IP services from any spot in Europe or the Western 
Hemisphere. They will plug your earth station into a terrestrial 
wireless ISP one of which is Concentric. There is the Tachyon 
business model.

But you have my business model, when you extend from that base 
station, out 20 miles in every direction, wirelessly, and split the 
cost of the monthly service between 20 clients. Because then this 
investment is economic in every small town in America. Suddenly you 
don't have any phone company involved at all. And that model is 
really significant, because that basically becomes a real solution 
for the most remote towns in the U.S.

Tachyon is one of the first satellite providers which does this 
inside a tolerable cost envelope. It is using the SatMex5 satellite 
system, launched in July 1999.  Therefore it should be a while before 
the satellite wears out.  See http://www.tachyon.net for more 
information. The Tachyon model of course also fits the most 
difficult, remote, field research. One ground station, on a hill, and 
10 to 100 data loggers out in every direction - all linked to it, 
wirelessly.

COOK Report: Is the business model emerging that Concentric will 
offer a family of services via Tachyon for small, remote communities 
who can link into the Tachyon system and then from Tachyon to 
Concentric to the rest of the Internet?

Hughes: Yes, that's what they are trying to do. But it also fits 
field scientific research, which is why I am pursuing it. Globalstar 
is also a good bet. Now it went down in stock price when Iridium 
collapsed. But what's the huge difference? Iridium was analog. 
Globalstar, uses Qualcomm CDMA radios. And Quaalcom is coming out 
with their 2.4 mbs 'HDR' wireless technology. 
http://www.qualcomm.com/cda/tech/hdr/

COOK Report: Well, McCaw took a look at Iridium and passed on it, but 
McCaw I think is investing in Globalstar, isn't he?

Hughes: Don't know. But Globalstar, has the Qualcomm CDMA spread 
spectrum radio.  It is basically only able to deliver right now 9600 
baud. But, when I made a recent cold call to Qualcomm, they were so 
solicitous of me, that on the same day they delivered to me the cable 
I needed to both charge the damn thing and use the data at the same 
time.   Consequently out in the sticks untended it could be getting 
power and transmit the scientific data that we want to gather. Before 
they had two separate cables.  You had to manually shift them to go 
between data use and recharging.

COOK Report: This happened at the San Diego Supercomputer Center 
Wireless meeting?

Hughes: Yes. With the Qualcomm radio, as they issue it right now, you 
get a plug, there's a plug in the bottom of the radio and you go into 
the recharger. Charge the radio. You unplug that thing and then you 
put another plug in to do a data cable, RS232 to a computer. Two 
different plugs. But not two different sockets. There's only a single 
socket for the two plugs.

COOK Report: Yeah, you have to do one or the other, but you wanted to do both.

Hughes: Exactly. And for their techs, they were doing both. But for 
their business model, they didn't think of that. So in their lab they 
had the cables.

I actually made a cold call in the morning and talked to the business 
section. Didn't come on real strong, all I said is that I'm doing 
research for the National Science Foundation. I spent $2,600 on your 
stuff, including the car kit and everything else. $1,500 phone. And I 
said, But what I need is the cable that I understood before I bought 
it exists, but back at Qualcomm, not at Globalstar. I need it to hook 
up biological scientist's data loggers way out there where there is 
no cellular, no place close enough to link up with 20 mile 
terrestrial wireless, and of course, no telco or cableco.

And I got home at night at 9 o'clock and they had delivered to my 
hotel the cable that basically plugs in the bottom and has it halfway 
down the cable is a little plastic box that has an input to it. But 
much more significantly, I had a call back request to call the guy at 
home, the international marketing guy and when I did, he said, we'll 
brief you, we'll show you the next generation. I'll get that briefing 
in late July.

Satellite to No License Wireless Distribution

Qualcom is wireless. It is digital, not analog, as Iridium foolishly 
was. And it is a variation of spread spectrum. It's not free. But 
it's a lot less expensive than any other terrestrial solutions for 
really remote sites.

COOK Report: What kind of a satellite system is Tachyon using?

Hughes: They can use anybody's. They are not stuck to one. They did 
that intentionally.  Now they are on SatMexV.  They can spread their 
service by renting space on other birds.

COOK Report: So, in other words, they're really kind of an uplink, 
downlink infrastructure.

Hughes: Exactly. But bi-directional IP. That's very important. Other 
satellite operators are selling downlinks by satellite where the 
return to the Internet goes by phone lines.  Of course if you are out 
in the wilderness with no phone this model doesn't do much good.

I talk a lot about this, because I think that's an integral part of 
the wireless revolution. It's wireless terrestrially, horizontally, 
and it's wireless vertically - to satellites. It's the combination 
that really makes it. I might just do this for kicks in my company. 
I'll get that satellite sitting on my roof here and I'll offer a 
separate ISP service to my neighbors, wireless. That model will work. 
I will get 64 KBS up and 300 KBS down for a total of about $795 a 
month, flat rate. $596 is Tachyon only. Tachyon plus the Concentric 
Internet connection is $795. Customers will normally purchase the 
service from Concentric - including the Tachyon ground station 
installation and four static IP addresses. Total throughput is 
measured.  For example the total through put for the lowest priced 
service is three gigabytes per month.  If customer exceeds this, he 
will pay 20 cents a megabyte for the extra data.  The high end 
service allows ten gigabytes per month

COOK Report: So that pays for both the Tachyon prices and the 
Concentric link to the Internet.

Hughes: Yes. But what is somewhat significant on that one, it's like 
a telephone company demarc the Tachyon rep says, (where the phone 
company terminates at your premises).  A demarc is where you plug 
into our ground station. What you do with it on the other side, it 
doesn't matter. The Tachyon cost is not one of these things, where if 
you use five computers, it costs you one thing, if it's ten, it's 
another. You're paying for bandwidth.

And that system - only because of the FCC - can go uplink and 
downlink at two megabits per second. The point is that Tachyon can 
offer a service at two megs now. Not what I'm getting, which is the 
low end 64 up and 300 KBS down. That's correct. But you see that neat 
little combination, because that opens the door. That opens the door 
not just to the U.S. That opens the door to the rest of the world.

National Environmental Observatory Network

COOK Report: Take us through a summary of the things that you saw at 
the San Diego meeting.

Hughes: I'll mention NEON, which everybody seems to know about. 
National Environmental Observatory Network. And the word 
'observatory' is kind of key here, because what they're doing is 
gathering huge amounts of data from remote monitors.

COOK Report: So you're seeing a huge movement under foot in 
environmental science and in other parts of the science world to use 
wireless monitors.

Hughes: I would describe it as a sudden awareness that wireless is a 
big piece of the answer - data collection - to what they want to do.

COOK Report: And it's now economically feasible to do it and, if they 
get out and do it, it's going to be another huge input of bandwidth 
into the Internet?

Hughes: Yes. Because you must also understand the observatory concept 
here, the observatory means it isn't just the scientists getting 
data, it means that you and I can look at the damn thing. Everybody. 
Citizen science, said Larry Smarr. Meaning you can't afford to have 
high paid university researchers going out and getting all the data. 
This is a direct quote from him - you need to train 9-year-olds to 
collect data.

COOK Report: Because they want so much of it, it's so widespread?

Hughes: Because you have to. When you're talking environmental and 
ecological, you're dealing with a huge number of data points and all 
over and you've got a data collection problem that up till now has 
been a manual operation. Or a problem with limited resources. For 
example the federal government down in Puerto Rico, (the Forest 
Service) is out there with more expensive stuff than even the 
colleges use. They showed me the Sutron data collector on a stream. 
Sutron especially sells to governments. It's not just better 
equipment, it's more pricey. But it's also designed to sit out there 
forever on water courses, it isn't just for science engineering. It's 
also for monitoring flow rates, Army Corps of Engineer kinds of 
things. But then, it was going to a satellite, but in terms of cost 
effectiveness, they shut it off, it just wasn't justifiable, because 
it used to cost a lot to get data to the satellites.

What was NEON? The steps here is that NEON is a proposed project and 
they're having workshops, (this was the second) for which they bring 
in scientists. The focus is across disciplines from biological 
through environmental networking and computational. And the concept 
is interconnecting the scientists, the data and the databases and the 
visualizations and the standardization of data across disciplines. 
All of which requires a step up in data collection and reporting 
infrastructure.

What's the purpose of the meeting? The first part was for those of us 
who knew of technical capabilities, or in other words who knew what 
could be done, to be sure that the scientists sitting around there 
representing these various disciplines learned about the technology 
available to them.  When they decide how the money ($100 million) 
should be spent, we also want to be certain that they don't think in 
terms of how they would have done it last year. Whether it is 
wireless, data bases, networking, visualization, or computation and 
number crunching.

Bringing the Scientists up to Wireless Speed

COOK Report: You're educating them about data gathering.

Hughes: Yes, how to gather data remotely, real time, and through the 
Internet right to the sensors themselves. Instead of gathering the 
data through data loggers manually, by making visits to where the 
data loggers sit in the wilderness. What became very clear was that I 
needed to rub elbows with more of these biological scientists than 
I'm seeing. With just two projects right now (Puerto Rico and 
Wisconsin) and I needed to see what they're doing in other places and 
other ways.

COOK Report: You saw it there big time.

Hughes: Well, in two ways I saw it. What I was totally unprepared 
for, because I was just going to be an observer in this thing, was 
how oblivious these people were to what's available right now or has 
even become available in the last couple of years. They are still in 
the 9600 baud, RS232, coming out of a little piece of equipment, 
manually connected by short cables world.

And they don't need a lot more, because a lot of the data gathering 
is nothing but a handful of numbers. But, so I showed them, across 
the board, all the stuff that you can do at higher speed. And I also 
went to Scripps.

COOK Report: Where you saw all the earthquake sensors.

Hughes: All the earthquake stuff. They were using a very elaborate 
set-up, all based upon the Freewave 115 KBS radio. But they could do 
it, because the radio can handle the data rates that they needed. And 
they were using  Glenayre radios also for going to a couple of 
points. But I knew more about radio than they did. And they were 
still messing around with compression as a solution to getting more 
bandwidth through. That is an important point, because that's getting 
easier to do.

Then, I took him to Tachyon. And I also found that there was Mr. 
Wireless for the university. There was Mr. Infrastructure. There was 
from up in a different campus, Mr. Data Processing guy. These were 
the key central guys who run the systems. And there was a discussion 
about what they needed to do to get the data, but they kept 
mentioning how expensive satellite was and they just kind of ruled it 
out of their minds. And I said, right here under your nose is your 
answer. And then, they didn't even know.

COOK Report: And Tachyon's headquarters is San Diego, yes?

Hughes: Of course. They didn't even know that Tachyon has a ground 
station on top of the Supercomputer Center and it goes into their 
network at the San Diego NAP. And, of course, if it goes into their 
NAP, you don't have to go out by Concentric, right? If it's a 
research and education application.

But Frank had not seen that data. Then there was meeting of the 
scientists, where I made the second presentation. To hear that you 
can be doing 10 megabits per second with $500 radios just blew their 
mental doors off. Or when Frank, sitting in the back of the room, 
said, "at Scripps I go 100 kilometers with a pair of three-way 
radios." And I said, "Boosted?"

No! Right out of the box, he replied. FCC standard regulations. 
Anybody can do it.

Methods of Data Collection

Okay, so they saw that, but this whole data collection stuff is based 
upon sensors and entering devices and data loggers and data loggers 
from Sutron or Campbell - Campbell is one of the big ones - these 
things are boxes that are smart as hell. They cost from $2, 
000-10,000. They sit out there hooked to devices, like weather 
stations, underwater sensors, light sensors, motion, wildlife 
sensors. And you can have many, many devices, hundreds of them. And 
then they collect it.

But in, almost every case, they collect it manually into a module 
which then can be detached from the data collector. The module, which 
just a memory storage device is brought back into the lab, which is 
at a forward research station and dumped into a computer with the 
software.

COOK Report: Well, that's the old way of doing it, right?

Hughes: Yes. That's the way that's very customary. Unless it's inside 
a lab. But this is the field stuff. And so that's the way they're 
doing it.

Hughes: Now, even Campbell does sell a connection to a traditional 
satellite transponder service. Big cost. Expensive way of doing 
things. They don't think about that. It's just too damn expensive. 
And anyway, your Internet's got to get to the forward research 
station, too. Which it doesn't do down in Puerto Rico. And the 
research station Internet link was only 56 KB when I went up to 
Wisconsin.

And here's another very concrete example - and I haven't got the 
solution, yet, but it's very typical. Right there in Madison, 
Wisconsin, the main university campus sits on Lake Medora. And the 
University has a Center of Limnology, which is the study of great 
water bodies. Now they have satellites pass over and taking very 
costly, scientific measurements, where the colors in a photograph 
represent temperatures and certain chemical properties of the water 
and so on. The problem is calibrating actual conditions on the lake 
with what the satellite sees.

So the point is that they've been sending people on boats out  to 
some 60 different points on the lake. With a graduate student and on 
each boat, as the satellite passes over, the student grabs the 
temperature and a test tube full of the water. And they come back to 
the lab and analyze it. They then get from those points, temperature 
and water composition that they use to calibrate the colors on the 
satellite. They have no way to 'calibrate' the satellite, with real 
time lake data. To do it real time, instantaneously, on a mass basis. 
The methodology is a labor intensive use of many people in many boats.

Obviously,   wireless comes in there, because, if one power boat came 
roaring around the lake and dropped off a little tiny buoy that had a 
radio which basically broadcast that data instantaneously, on command 
or whatever, then that suddenly changes the nature of what they are 
doing. Paul Hanson, who is their chief tech, heard my pitch and ran 
out so fast they couldn't see straight. They now have $20,000 buoys 
and they bought Aironet radios. In order to see what kind of range 
the radio had, they put the thing in a boat to go all the way across 
the lake. They ran out of water before they ran out of radio. And so 
all of a sudden, that's big stuff to them. Then up in northern 
Wisconsin, their problems are not a matter of the labor on the data 
points, but in getting the data from instruments, situated out in the 
middle of a lake, on a raft.

Now, let's talk about the levels. Ned Fetcher is a researcher in 
Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the university. One of the things he's 
been doing down there is modeling the light on the bottom of the 
forest floor. There's two parts to what he does. He has a data 
logger. And then they have these little $15, sophisticated, 
photosensitive light diodes. His colleague puts out twelve at a time. 
They have about 40 of them out there at once.

Okay, but here's the problem. They only go out to about 25 meters, 75 
feet. But they have to lay a wire on the floor of the forest. But 
people and animals and falling branches break the wire and they lose 
the data.

So he said, is there any way you can get a low-cost, $50 or less, 
radio. And so that's when I went to this smallest radio in the world 
outfit and I'm having a kit shipped to me, I think it will do the 
job. It has a chip on it and everything else.  These cheap radios 
become themselves data collectors. Data just goes there and into a 
bigger radio, back to the center and then into the data logger and be 
processed.

In other words twelve or more of these little radios, each with a 
light sensor and a pattern on the floor of the forest will 
communicate back to a central point no more than 300 feet away. The 
data is sent into a radio, where it will be passed back to he field 
sation.

COOK Report: So the $50 radio goes about 300 feet.

Hughes: Right. And then the radio that doesn't even have to be an 
Ethernet radio, it can be a serial radio, like the $300 radio. That 
data gets collected, then, in the data logger back at the research 
station which may be a mile or two away.

New Technobiology Enables New Methodologies

So that is a way to do what he wants and he was really excited about 
that possibility. He said it would totally transform the way that he 
now has to work in order to get his modeling data. The experimenter 
down there, a woman scientist in Puerto Rico, Jill Thompson, said 
they have so much bad data because of broken wires that the 
experiment may be useless. And all of a sudden, if they can put that 
little thing out there without wires, then all you have worry about 
is theradio itself being stepped on.

But you've got another advantage here. It's real time. What really 
turned on everybody on was the ability to look at the data in real 
time. Not just to get it, because it goes back not just to the 
research station, it also goes into the Internet at the same time. 
And it may have to be wireless from that point back to the 
university. Because the research stations are usually out in the 
woods. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing in Puerto 
Rico. With wireless we will get from the field research station back 
to the main university and from that out to the 'Net, so that the 
researcher, who may be at any university in the world can not only 
see this stuff, but also see if something's gone wrong. And then 
theresearcher can talk to a graduate student who can go out there and 
remove the leaf that fell over the sensor or repair whatever has to 
be repaired.

Now I have covered two ways of researchers getting back wireless 
data. One is going directly from the sensor by wireless. The other is 
going from a data logger by wireless, which in turn is collecting 
stuff from sensors, that may be very close to it. The gathered data 
may then go either terrestrially with a relay back to some research 
center, or it may go directly to a satellite. And that's where the 
Qualcomm phone comes in. If 9600 baud's all you need, you simply plug 
it in and send your data back via satellite. Unless you need to send 
the data constantly, you can do it periodically, at a cost of $1.50 a 
minute. Maybe 4 minutes a day.

But let's look at the third level where you're getting into a little 
bit more. The Coqui frogs. Here we want sound. Not just some sound, 
but quality sound. A subspecies of Coqui frog that only live on the 
top of mount Toro. Requiring that researchers had to climb the 
mountain, after dark, in the nearly perpetual rain, go into a blind, 
record after midnight when the frogs sing,  and then come down in the 
morning. Very labor intensive.

Why not use radio they asked me? Sure I said. Now I have to deliver. 
So we've got to have enough bandwidth to make sure this is not 
distorted. Enough that they can't, when they record it, back at the 
university, lose that all the flavor. Because I noticed that when we 
went there, and they asked me, can we go up this mountain to do this? 
They had even gone back to Sony to have them optimize the microphone 
to improve its reception in certain frequencies, to match the frog. 
And so the question becomes do you have to have enough bandwidth for 
fidelity of sound? Therefore a low end 56kbps serial radio is 
probably not enough.

But then the last project I was asked to do is pretty interesting 
because it is full motion video from down in Puerto Rico.  The guy 
who wants me to do it heard me when I was down there last summer 
talking to 40 scientists. For eight years his work has been tracking 
freshwater shrimp under water. And he has underwater camera doing 
part of the data collection. He wants me to interface the underwater 
camera to a high enough bandwidth to have full motion video, which 
can be seen, back in the upper 48 states, real time. Not just have a 
graduate student, as he does now, go out and manually hold a 
waterproof camera down there, tape record the shrimp, and send the 
tapes by snail mail to the distant researcher.

Now, you're talking about higher speed radios, 5 to 10 meg radios or 
above. And yet that's cheap to do now. Distance is not great in this 
case and you're not going to go to satellite with that 10 megs. But 
you sure as hell can go back to your research center, you may have to 
compress, and do all sorts of other things, but nevertheless, the 
radios will permit this. They will go through the forward research 
station to the university, wirelessly, 15 miles away. From thence 
into the global Internet. I've already got cameras from Axis, a 
Swedish company (http://www.axis.com). The cameras themselves are web 
servers. With individual IP addresses inside the camera. With a 
serial port, and an Ethernet port. The Swedes only thought you could 
communicate from them by either slow cell phone, or in-building 
Ethernet. They never thought of 2mbps wireless radios connecting them 
up. However, I have. We are doing it. Not full motion, only 10 jpeg 
frames a second. But a step above still pictures, while below full 
motion with sound.

Watch out UUNET, the frogs and the shrimp are coming - using your bandwidth.

And so when I was holding up these radios in front of these 
biological scientists, they really jumped on me after it was over, 
and started asking me about coming to their projects. Including for 
example, one up in Michigan who uses parabolic dishes to capture 
sounds of both insects and bird life. And they would love to have 
those things sitting out there all the time. And not trying to keep a 
tape recorder going and all that stuff.

Tiny Linux, Forest Fires and Sensors

COOK Report: All right, can we finish up with the forest fires and the sensors?

Hughes: The tiny Linux thing, including Web, is the project that I 
have basically asked Steve Roberts, the hacker who used a recumbent 
bicycle in Mountain View, to do. Remember him?

COOK Report: The Internet-connected bicycle?

Hughes: Yeah, through radio. Then, but he now, he's working right now 
on canoes. He's got project going down the Missouri River and the 
Mississippi and going up the inland waterway and then back across 
Canada. It'll take two years.

Well, one of the things that he was playing with there and I jumped 
on when I heard about it, is the concept of a very small, 
solar-powered, mobile data sensor capture, database and communicator. 
With this you grab the data on the move, not with fixed points. So 
he's doing that right now on a subcontract, and we call it WANDER 
2000. (Wireless Acquisition of Networked Data for Environmental 
Research). It's a prototype, which will be done by this summer. The 
device will be under 15 pounds total weight. It will have a miniature 
Linux running in RAM and a database in it and a variety of sensors 
can be hooked to it.

And so whether you're on the water moving or whether you're on a 
trail moving, with a backpack, horse, motorized vehicle, or whatever, 
you can take sensors and put it into the database, which can also be 
a website, using Apache, if you can reach it. And communicate it by 
either Globestar or whatever, and by other means.

But there's a very important point here. And it was reinforced at 
that meeting. You've got to have reliable capture of data even if all 
other communication is severed, such as during a hurricane. And so 
the small Linux comes into play, not just that it puts up a little 
website and a database, but it captures reliably the data even if 
your communications are down for one reason or another. It gets sent 
when you have re-established communications. The ability to cache in 
a data base. That is already mastered in Data Loggers. And in 
institutional computers. Now we must do it when linked, wirelessly. 
The tool to do this is a tiny Linux server, which may be in RAM.

And I was even asked is there any way I can go out on the plains of 
mid America where they have firestorms, prairie fires. Can I come up 
with a way to communicate the temperature of the fire at ground level 
and the gases that are being emitted, real time, while the fire is 
just feet away from the radio?

Challenge? Not for wireless, that's easy. But survival has to be 
dealt with. Okay, the combination of these things is what drove me to 
this wireless outfit and I'm really excited, because first of all, 
that prototype called WANDER 2000 will be done by this summer and we 
will basically exercise it. And the full plans of that, including the 
wireless connectivity to it, will be basically on the website, 
www.worldwireless.com. But at the same time, on that other island, 
Whidbey Island, is where this other guy is that I tracked down 
yesterday.

COOK Report: Whidby Island, near Seattle?

Hughes: Whidby, I guess that's where it is. But what happened is Dan 
Withers with World Wireless, whom I contacted, is not only a reseller 
for World Wireless' very tiny, low-cost stuff, super-miniature radios 
that include website capability. Tiny short range ones as well as one 
that's only going to be $300 to go a distance. He will be presenting 
his engineering at a national convention of sensor manufacturers. 
Because at that level at which he is operating we can actually open 
the door to transmission from the individual sensor. A weather sensor 
or something and not just a big complex testing device of some kind. 
Pushing the radio and the wireless data collection really down to a 
point.

And the way you do that is you don't expect to go all the way with 
that little radio, but you go to a next point of aggregation and the 
next point of aggregation. But it's not only going up to the 'Net, it 
is bi-directional. And so you can have a very tiny, specialized 
website with the data shown on it and remote access it. Note also 
that this fits in with the Globe project, the observatory idea.

COOK Report: The data is collected automatically and would go into 
these little Databases contained in the RAM of the Linux  operating 
system on board the radio. And the sensors, then, are feeding into a 
radio within a few hundred yards or something? And as part and parcel 
of all this you automatically fed into a remote distributed series of 
Linux databases that do things with it there and then feed the data 
back upstream?

Hughes: Yes and you used a very significant statement there.

COOK Report: Distributed?

Hughes: Distributed. Because one of the things that was even 
discussed at the Neon meeting was how are you going to crunch all 
this data? One way is centralized, terraflop computers with high 
bandwidth between them. The other one is the distributed process. 
And, see, already, there's been a model for this. I can't give you 
the details on it, but there was a miniature Linux that went up that 
was in RAM with extremely low-powered electrical draw on a space 
shuttle that was used for the data processing and data collection for 
experiments that were on board.

The Tiny Linux has three capabilities. Well, first of all, it's IP to 
begin with. And number two, it can have a true database. And number 
three, it can process. Programs can process the stuff. And then 
number four, it can actually also be a web point, an accessible 
point. I mean, two-way, not just a broadcast way or not just a 
capture way. And the wireless connection from it gives you the 
bi-directional access to it. The only thing is, you've got to control 
that, you can't have 10,000 people all trying to look at the damn 
thing at once. So you have a management problem there. But the whole 
idea of the observatory is that you could call up a sensor sitting in 
the middle of a hurricane out on the tip of Manhattan and what's it 
saying right now?

COOK Report: A better example would be the estuary of the Mississippi 
River out into the Gulf of Mexico.

Hughes: But that's going to be, I think it's going to be almost 
equally true in the big, urban areas. Particulates and all that. 
Wireless, low-cost, no license, from low to pretty high bandwidth. 
Sophisticated sensors. And the ability to connect to and adjust or 
otherwise interoperate with the censor in real time.

You have the ability to use miniature Linux as a true IP handling 
device, and as an IP router. It can be a router from different 
sensors. Remember the conviction of those who say that everything in 
the world is going to have an IP number in it. In the summing up 
after they huddled up into groups and came back with reports, on the 
last afternoon and I said every damn Cocqui frog's going to have an 
IP number. We may be putting something around his neck or embedding 
in its ear. Or if we're really sophisticated, we'll read it out of 
his DNA. DNA as IP numbers. What a gasser!

But that's, of course, fundamental to the Internet. And it's 
fundamental to the IP flow that's there and the wireless just permits 
this in places that are inconceivable. And it's going to be extremely 
important to biologists and environmental scientists, because their 
problem is dealing with data and sensing and knowing what's going on 
in the most remote ways, way beyond where any commercial wire line is 
ever going to go.

Well, in closing, everything I am doing with wireless,  from remote 
cabins in the mountains to frogs in the rainforest, is laying down 
the techniques for using wireless to every human being on this 
planet, wherever they are. And at data rates up to full motion real 
time video, affordably. There is a revolution coming for the 
Internet, thanks to terrestrial, no license wireless, digital signal 
processors, smart software, IP servers, satellites and the universal 
connectability of the entire global net.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ASSESSING THE CURRENT STATE OF IP TELEPHONY
DATA AND VOICE CONVERGING AT THE PROTOCOL AND APPLICATION LEVELS
TELEPHONY BECOMES TOOL TO BE ACTIVATED FROM A WEB PAGE WHILE
NEW WEB ORIENTED APPLICATIONS MAKE QOS LESS AN ISSUE

Editors' Note: Jonathan Rosenberg is Chief Scientist for dynamicsoft 
Inc. and is responsible for guiding the strategic technology 
direction of dynamicsoft's suite of eConvergence products, which 
support the delivery of applications and services over 
next-generation networks. Before joining dynamicsoft, he was a member 
of the technical staff with Bell Labs Research, Lucent Technologies. 
He joined dynamicsoft in October 1999 and received his Bachelors and 
Masters degrees simultaneously from MIT in 1995. He is currently 
finishing his PhD at Columbia University.

COOK Report: What's been happening, I gather, since some point in the 
fall of 1999 to really change and speed the convergence picture 
between voice and data networks? One of the last things I published 
last summer was a very short essay that said, in effect, everything's 
kind of on hold at the moment in Voice over IP (VOIP) protocol 
development.

Now before that, during the Level 3 protocol development work that 
turned into Megaco, I published a really long, detailed, lengthy 
description of the protocol issues involved in getting the public 
switched networks to talk to voice over IP networks and so on. In 
view of that I would like to focus in more on the situation over the 
past year and assume a reasonable degree of knowledge on the part of 
my readers. Please help me to get a handle on recent changes.

Rosenberg: MGCP came onto the scene at about the same time that SIP 
was beginning to gain some sort of support. SIP actually has been 
complete for some time, I should say, with its own RFC in February of 
1999. But I think people were trying to figure out what the story was 
and decide whether they were headed in the right direction.

COOK Report: If you go back a year, Level 3, with IPDC and then with 
Megaco, thought they had the universe by the tail and they thought 
that they had the key piece of the puzzle. However when you examine 
the strategy of the pre-standards group that they pulled together and 
the way that they hoped things would go from there, I gather that it 
didn't really go very smoothly in that direction.

Rosenberg: IETF and ITU efforts did merge although not quickly. But 
to the credit of everyone involved this is really a success in the 
sense that ITU and IETF both managed to work on this thing and both 
come out with the same thing.

COOK Report: And the same thing in this case is an offspring of Megaco?

Rosenberg: There were IPDC, SGCP, MGCP inputs to all these various 
standards bodies and both ITU and IETF decided to take it up. IETF 
started the Megaco working group, whose protocol was to be called, I 
guess, Megaco.

Megaco As Device Control Protocol

COOK Report: And that was December '98, I think, roughly.

Rosenberg: Yes, it sounds about right. And then ITU picked it up as 
well and decided that its output would be called H.248.

COOK Report: Okay, that's new information to me.

Rosenberg: So the agreement was to work those groups in parallel.

COOK Report: In 1999?

Rosenberg: I don't remember exactly when the decision was made, or 
which model they went for, but early '99, yes. They bounced stuff 
from IETF into ITU and from there back into IETF. This back-and-forth 
process was undertaken with the hope being that both sides could come 
to a document that was perhaps different in formatting, but identical 
in content.

COOK Report: So how did that work out?

Rosenberg: It did actually happen, but not without a great amount of 
air travel, stress, and bickering back and forth as you would expect.

COOK Report: So when did the baked goods come out of the oven and 
what were they called?

Rosenberg: Well, they're just cooling right now, actually. Megaco is 
not an RFC yet, but I think it has been submitted to the IESG for 
consideration as an RFC. I believe H. 248 is also going through its 
approval processes

COOK Report: So where will Megaco or H.248 fit into the big picture, 
now that they are finished?

Rosenberg: The protocols are identical, therefore let me refer to 
both as Megaco. Now Megaco functions as a device control protocol. 
The purpose is to take a large, telephony gateway, normally an SS7 
gateway, and decompose it into three elements. First a signaling 
gateway which interfaces to the actual SS7 signaling messages. Then 
there is a media gateway that handles the actual circuits or the 
audio, both on the telephone network and on the IP side. Finally 
there is the controller, that talks to them both.

The deal was that, the media gateway has a fairly high amount of data 
volume it has to process to do all the compression and echo 
cancellation and speech processing. Therefore they moved all the 
control and signaling functions from the media gateway to the media 
gateway controller. Consequently you need to have a protocol between 
this media gateway controller and the media gateway that allows the 
controller to tell the gateway to do things like "use this codec and 
send the compressed audio from circuit 3 on trunk 5 to this IP 
address."

COOK Report: And what are companies like Lucent and Nortel that are 
going to use and incorporate this protocol going to do with it?

Rosenberg: They're putting these things into soft switches. Soft 
switch is a word that bandied about a lot, but it's generally 
synonymous with media gateway controller or call agent. They all 
refer to the same box that fits in the IP cloud, talks Megaco to the 
media gateways and the signaling gateways and effectively controls 
the media gateways using this protocol. The soft switch becomes a way 
to decompose the SS7 gateways into a more logical signaling device.

COOK Report: If somebody is doing voice over IP or Internet telephony 
in the Internet, on TCP/IP networks, is a soft switch essentially, 
then, a translation device that allows this same person or company 
that's using the soft switch to do IP telephony to the entire public 
switched or global switched telephone network?

Rosenberg: Well, you don't need a soft switch to do that. If that is 
all you want to do, you could use the Internet telephone gateways 
that were just PC's with cards. You could buy those off the shelf 
years ago and you could allow Internet telephony end users on the 
telephone network to have access to that. But what soft switch is 
allowing us to do is to scale those systems much larger and to allow 
them to work better when inter operating directly with the SS7of the 
PSTN.

COOK Report: In other words, one such device in an organization with 
a lot of people can enable a lot of phone calls? Does this bring up 
immediate Quality of Service issues?

Rosenberg: Quality of Service is an issue, but this gateway 
decomposition does not have an effect on the issue.

COOK Report: So soft switches are useful for a large organization - 
for example a carrier or for someone who maybe selling Internet 
telephony or is doing a huge amount of Internet telephony and 
communication with the PSTN. But they would not be particularly 
useful for one organization that just wants to enable its 
headquarters office to do voice over IP to 150 branch offices around 
the world?

Rosenberg: Yes - exactly. A small enterprise doesn't need to have a 
soft switch, primarily because the soft switch is really geared for 
handling an SS7 interface.

COOK Report: So the soft switch is good, then, for a Level 3 or a 
Qwest, that wants to sell a lot of voice over IP to the public?

Rosenberg: Right.

COOK Report: I am told that ENUM is "hot." Can you take me through 
what happened with the ENUM working group. And can you help me 
understand where that's going?

Rosenberg: With ENUM the idea is to "map" phone numbers from the PSTN 
to Internet connected devices. In the case of me just picking up my 
phone and calling you on your phone with the call routed long 
distance over the Internet, we might have a soft switch there that's 
determining the call, but it doesn't need ENUM because the number 
that I dialed is already a PSTN phone number and it just pretty much 
assumes that.

However, if you have a call to a phone number, but that phone number 
is actually a device on the Internet, not on the PSTN, how do you 
contact this particular phone number? This is what ENUM is for. One 
of the reasons it was conceived is that IP phones were going to be 
given normal telephone numbers.

COOK Report: Do you mean, some numeric string @voip or whatever they 
would call the top level domain?

Rosenberg: No, it was going to be normal phone numbers that would be 
doled out to organizations. And that's why you need a database key to 
figure out, given a particular phone number, what provider owns that 
phone number so it could get it provisioned to resolve to a 
particular host or a SIP server.

COOK Report: Oh, instead of area code 44 for England or 7 for Russia, 
it might be 999 for Internet.

Rosenberg: Exactly. Actually, I'm not sure that that proposal is 
accepted or it might still be under consideration, but that's sort of 
irrelevant. In general, if you want to have a user from a phone call 
a user on a PC, somewhere you need some kind of directory service. 
That's the initial application. I think perhaps part of the reason it 
began to pick up steam is people realized that there were more 
applications than just that one. And of particular interest is the 
existence local number portability databases. It's fundamentally a 
database transaction.

COOK Report: So are you saying that in your web browser, 
Internet-aware telephone, you could have some segment of this 
database stored and that if you put in some phone number, it would 
have the appropriate intelligence to connect, to signal, and to get 
you where you wanted to go?

Rosenberg: The database wouldn't reside in my PC. Instead, like DNS, 
it resolves and sits out there inside of the network.

COOK Report: Client server?

Rosenberg: Right, DNS is client server. So what ENUM would enable, 
for example, if I were, from a normal phone or even from my PC, to 
dial some number which turns out to have been ported to a different 
provider, then, from the Internet side, the ENUM protocol could do a 
query, figure out the numb