The Island of the Wireless Guerrillas

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

By: Erick Schonfeld Business 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,38492,00.html