in this session, a bunch of people get 8 minutes each to talk.

Dewayne Hendricks is a network activist. He says that three years ago he was saying that wireless will be a competitor to cable and telcos, but people thought he was crazy. Now muni wireless is sweeping through. If you couldn’t see it three years ago, what did you miss and what are you missing now? Five years ago, Yakima County (sp?) in Washington state built a county-wide wifi network for public safety officials. Yet, wifi isn’t supposed to be able to go further than 300 feet, according to Michael Powell’s testimony to Congress three years ago, plus it’s going to moving vehicles. People making decisions don’t have standing because they’re not implementers.

A year ago, Dewayne says, counties started to put in clouds. All you hear about are the cities. Forces seem to be at work to keep us from hearing about the county implementations. He talks about Sandoval county where Dewayne’s business has already finished the first phase of a project to deliver 100mb to anyone in the county. This is the tipping point, he says, to make wireless a competitor. (The project started last October.) What’s changed is that there are now cheap, good commodity radios — you can put in multiple links to gain more capacity, plus range is better. Dewayne’s project is trying to drive the cost per megabit to a dollar, where it’s currently $125/mb. So far, Dewayne’s gotten the cost down to $50 and they hope to get it down to $25 soon. (In Hong Kong, you can get a megabit for $0.24, he says.) “Once you know something is possible, it changes everything. Wireless is the wild card. Let’s play it.”

Michael Calabrese is VP of the New America Foundation. He considers the empty TV channels as “rocket fuel for Dewayne’s vision.” Just the channels that have no licensed users range from 20-75% in various markets. There’s legislation that would free this up. It’s our “best chance for a commons.”

Rick Ringel, director of engineering at Inter-Tel, wonders how we define progress. What will the end-user’s experience be in the new network we’re building. He calls the new network “The Enlightened Network,” because in the Enlightment we talked about personal choice and fundamental rights.

Ben Scott of the Free Press. “We have a major education problem on the Hill” when it comes to the Internet. And with the rest of the country. So, here are some ways of telling the story: 1. The question is not who controls the architecture of the internet but who controls the user experience of the Net. 2. Net neutrality is about whether the Internet will become like the cable television networks where the operator determines what you can see. [I missed #3. Sorry.]

Brad Templeton, chairman of the EFF.org [you are a member, aren’t you?], talks about the invention of the Internet as a contract in which we all pay for lines to the middle and don’t worry about packets. Then his evil twin takes over and argues in favor of stopping competition and innovation by requiring permission to innovate, e.g. CALEA. (Brad’s presentation is here.)

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy: “It’s time now to stand up and fight to create a digital medium and a society that reflects our highest aspirations of our culture.” “We have to have a loud cry!”

Bruce Kushnick of Teletruth and author of “The Two Hundred Billion Broadband Scandal” — the scandal is that customers were charged for a fiber optic network that was supposed to be open to all competitors. “Why don’t we get the money back?” It began when Al Gore proposed an information superhighway. (His father had helped create the national highway system.) The Bells said they’d do it. Bruce has a document in which Verizon promises NJ that it could provide this service by 2001. “We were lied to.” They couldn’t build the networks so they rolled out DSL over the existing copy wires. “This happened in the majority of states.” Bruce thinks the municipalities ought to get their money back. “We should get mad.” Instead of making the argument that there are God-given rights, we should be pointing out that we already paid for a network that wasn’t built. [Tags: f2c bruce_kushnick net_neutrality jeff_chester cynthia_de_lorenzi, dewayne_hendricks brad_templeton rck_ringel]

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