With the success of 4G Wireless Evolution co-located with ITEXPO East 2010 in Miami Beach and CTIA Wireless conference and expo scheduled for March 23-25, 2010 in Las Vegas, an interview with wireless expert Brough Turner seemed the obvious plan.

Brough Turner is founder of Ashtonbrooke Corporation. Most recently he was a consultant to Dialogic on corporate strategy and new market development. Brough has more than 25 years of experience in the communications industry. He was the co-founder and CTO of Natural MicroSystems and NMS Communications, which was sold in parts in 2009. Brough blogs at http://blogs.broughturner.com/ on technology, economic and social issues of communications at the intersection of telecom, mobility and the Internet. He holds a BS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a highly sought after speaker for conferences such as eComm, ITEXPO, and World Technology Summit.”

The podcast interview with Brough is in two parts. A complete transcript follows between Suzanne Bowen, VP Marketing of Super Technologies, Inc., DIDX and Techistan with Brough Turner.

Part 1:  

Suzanne Bowen: Welcome to the DIDX media channel where we bring you the expertise of IP communications industry leaders from around the world. Today we have Brough Turner in part one of two podcasts .

We met at a VON conference in our shared interest in IP communications and a love of dance. Remember Jeff Pulver’s parties?

People may remember Brough Turner as one of the owners of NMS Communications. They sold it in pieces in December 2008, where one of the largest parts (traditional part) was sold to Dialogic. For the next six months, Brough was doing some consulting. Much has changed since then.

Brough Turner: No occasion to go dancing recently but …

Suzanne Bowen: I know. Come on Jeff, come back and give a party.

ITEXPO 2010 speakers received a list of questions to answer. One is about trends and changes in the industry. There is supposedly an economic crisis. Things do look a little bit better right now in December 2009. What do you think might enable new businesses in spawning new business activities?

Brough Turner:  One thing is in the Wi-Fi space… I’m known for lecturing on 3G and 4G wireless technology. For example, take Carl Ford’s 4G Wireless Evolution conference … I’ve spent more time this year on Wi-Fi. I have always used Wi-Fi, have been aware of it, but never participated in IEEE standards activity. Wi-Fi technology has been ahead of the cellular industry. It has been typically been focused on embedding wireless LANs, but the technology and modulation that is used since 802.11a back years ago. It’s the technology the4G guys are just beginning to use with WiMAX and LTE. “4G” technology has been in service within the Wi-Fi community for 8 or 9 years. The thing that is significant for the next 2-5 years is the combination of multiple antennas (MIMO) multiple input multiple output and software beam forming, that is antennas that are highly directional but can be shifted around in software. MIMO is already being shipped in Wi-Fi consumer products costing less than 100 bucks with two separate antennas. Four by four MIMO, that’s four separate antennas will be a consumer product in the first half of 2010. The reason this is interesting is eventual (RF stuff) but basically it makes the 5 gigahertz spectrum as useful or more useful than the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum.

There are so many accepted rules of thumb. Low frequencies are better. TV white spaces are beachfront spectrum. 2.4 GHz is short range, and 5 GHz is very short range, almost worthless. That’s true in terms of the technology for the last 100 years, but it’s not true in terms of electromagnetic… well, it’s true for a technologist, but not true for a physicist. What’s changing now with MIMO and multiple input multiple output antennas is it’s actually possible to send high capacity stuff at 5 gigahertz over distances that are equivalent to what you can do at 2.4 gigahertz. And BTW, there are either 24 separate 20 megahertz channels or 11 separate 30 megahertz channels up at 5 gigahertz. Compare that to only three 20 megahertz channels down to 2.4, so there’s a vast amount of additional spectrum that is available with 5 gigahertz which virtually no one has been using that is about to become very effective.

Early experiments with 11n radios (802.11n) in Wi-Fi products are showing that 5 gigahertz can be just as useful as 2.4 GHz. You can get dramatic performance improvements over anything that’s come before.

The second thing (beamforming is not available at consumer prices yet, but it’s beginning to show up at professional prices … like $10,000 and up and at enterprise prices like $800 – $1000 per access point. It will be a consumer technology within the next 2-3 years. That is directional antennas steered in software.

A typical Wi-Fi base station today broadcasts in all directions. That means when you add one, the next one down the hall is going to interfere with the one you just installed unless you run them in separate frequencies.

If you can make highly directional antennas and steer them in software, then you can dynamically connect to each individual client on a milli-second by milli-second basis. You’re talking to one client which is completely separate from talking to any other client and with a high directional beam, you can go a lot further.

What is about to happen is the performance of Wi-Fi mesh networks is about to go up by a factor of 100 over what was possible last year (2008). That will reach consumer prices over the next 2-4 years. When you see factor of a 100 change in performance,that’s interesting. There has got to be some market problems that this technology can solve.

Suzanne Bowen: So, a business would have the potential to access of a larger WiFi footprint. In the long run, they would save money.

Brough Turner: There are a bunch of companies going after “how can I cover a building with fewer access points?” The question is what else could I use this technology for if I wanted to do something radically different? Some companies have attempted to build mesh networks in order to fill in areas where they cannot run wires. That has not worked very well in the past because Wi-Fi doesn’t go very far.

In the past, if you wanted to build an urban network without running wires everywhere, you could build a mesh network. There are companies doing that. They are lucky if they end up getting 1 or 2 MBs per second delivered after they have gone through 4 or 5 hops. That’s the thing that is about to change. 3 or 4 years from now, you’ll be able to cover a city with consumer-priced stuff in a wireless mesh with very few … obviously the point of the mesh is to minimize the number of wires you need. You need wires to gateway back to the Internet at certain points. It’s an advantage if you don’t have to run wires to every access point, especially in an urban environment, where you do not own the “right of way” …

You’re inside your office building, you lease the whole space. You can run wires anywhere you want. You go outdoors and suddenly you can’t run wires everywhere. So, that’s certainly an area… one of the observations that I’ve made … I was talking to a friend who’s opening a business in downtown.

(There is a moment of silence here where I was in a tunnel and lost my Internet. Really wish we could have heard what his friend wanted to do. I lost my train of thought which did not help me start back where I needed to.

Brough Turner:  I’m looking for applications that fill market gaps; where this technology could be applied. One of them I am investigating (not a slam-dunk) is that, in dense urban areas, the cost for getting Internet connectivity can vary by a factor of 20 or 50 even a block apart.

(Ah, here we go.)

A friend of mine is consulting with investment types on technology issues. It’s actually a practice with 4 or 5 guys who have opened an office in Boston. Their new office is on the 7th floor of an office building one block away from the largest Internet exchange point in New England (at One Summer Street in Boston). There are about 20 different carriers there. If you’re inside that building, you can buy Internet transit service in small quantities for less than $10 per MB per second per month and large quantities for less $4 per month.

Just one block away, it cost twenty times that. Equivalent services have to come via T1 lines. It’s an incredible inflated price. If you look at any other form of Internet connectivity whether it is business DSL and shared access and compare it with the underlying cost of what is happening, there is about a 20X or occasionally 50X gap there. 

If you could literally supply a mesh that involved a bunch of people in office buildings up and down that one city block between One Summer Street and my friend’s office, there’s an opportunity to do something interesting. How do you do it? That’s a whole separate issue. This may be an opportunity for a premium-based business. Offer free services and also offer premium services with guaranteed bandwidth. If you want to participate, you have to buy your own access point and hang it in your window.

Who knows? The point is that there is a very interesting technology revolution that is going to happen. It could be shaped in a number of directions.

Now, the question is where else are there market gaps that this technology can be useful for?

 There is a set of technology issues. There are 8 or 10 companies selling wireless mesh networking nodes today. The market is not very large, and the technology hasn’t been very good. If that improves by 20 times or 100 times, possibly over the next 3 years, it changes where the technology can be applied.

Suzanne Bowen: From what I’ve heard about mesh networking, the technology has been a “save the day” solution. Think hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. I remember our office was destroyed in Pensacola. It was worse in New Orleans. Some companies and individuals got together and set up mesh networking which kept some critical services and businesses alive, so disaster recovery could take place. This is not just to save money, or make money, stop the digital divide but also disaster recovery.

Brough Turner:  The technology is real. The point is if the available speed or throughput goes up two orders of magnitude over a period of just a few years, what does that enable? It’s a viable technology and at least ten companies are playing in this field.

It potentially enables some different business models because you can think of a lot of different organizations coming together with different pieces of equipment and connecting things together. Dare I call it an intranet?

It doesn’t have to be as organized as cellular mobile telephony system which is incredibly complex and centrally administered.

* Meraki, Tropos, Belair Networks, Strix (provided what Jeff Pulver used when first starting up Wi-Fi conference coverage), SkyPilot, Aruba Networks, Mesh Dynamics, FireTide, Packet Hop, and mesh networking nodes available from Motorola, Nortel, and Cisco … There’s an IEEE standard for mesh networking that was just completed in the last year called 802.11S.

How can you get in touch with Brough Turner?

Visit http://www.broughturner.com. On this page, you can find Brough on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. Type “brough,” “3G tutorial,” or “4G tutorial” into Google or your favorite search engine, and you’ll find many links to Brough Turner.

Part 2:  

Brough Turner:  Another thing is the one laptop per child, the Negroponte … little green machines. They use the mesh network protocol, a precursor, that became 802.11s.  It is all open sourced and high performance because the radios are the lowest cost possible you can build into these PCs. It’s functional. You can get a bunch of kids in a schoolroom so they can communicate with each other.

Suzanne Bowen: What a great learning experience. Have you heard of Inveneo?

Brough Turner: I don’t know.

Suzanne Bowen: I’m following them on Twitter and have been paying attention to them for quite a while. They do mesh networking and are involved in nonprofit activities. Have you heard of their peddling to power laptops? They are headquartered in San Francisco.

Brough Turner: I’ll check it out. I’m an engineer in origin, but I’m also an entrepreneur. I’m looking for ways to do something on a commercial basis. Even if I want to change the world, I’d like to have it be break even or net positive as opposed to being a community effort. Community efforts are dependent upon a few charismatic people in specific locations.

Suzanne Bowen: Right, like we have people in developer groups who are involved in open source and also evangelists full of zeal. One particular open source software can be like a religion. So an entrepreneur comes along and monetizes it. There can be a “war” between both groups.  Innovation is excellent. Community efforts are, too. But people do have to pay bills and have families to take care of. I have a blog on TMCnet.com called “Monetizing IP Communications,” and I am not ashamed of it.

Brough Turner:  In the first part of the year, I was investigating some other things, like is there a way that I can have a dramatic effect on the US broadband access gap? Like how to bypass the duopoly and getting fiber through the middle mile. But fiber requires right of way, so it remains too political. I’m an entrepreneur, not a politician. I don’t enjoy having to work with legislators to influence public policy.

If I had to pick a model, it would be commercial… look at all the revolutions in recent years such as Google. They stumbled accidentally into this advertising thing. Who would have thought there was room for another search engine?

Suzanne Bowen: Look what was around: Netscape…

Brough Turner: I used to use Altavista.

Suzanne Bowen: Babelfish was my favorite for translation and now that falls under Yahoo!

Brough Turner: Think of things like Craig’s List, a “freemium” business model. It’s free but he charges money for commercial real estate listings in certain cities like New York. He has found a new model that is dramatically less expensive. He has turned what was a multi-billion dollar business into a one hundred million dollar business.

Just like the Google free search, there is something in back of it that is funding. There’s a Wired article about it and with just thirty employees. He’s profitable and reinvests in growth.

Suzanne Bowen: It bypassed red tape.

Brough Turner: And it’s a profitable business. It you have a business that is doing better than break even, then you have a chance of scaling it indefinitely. Just a community network is difficult to scale if they are free. I wouldn’t mind changing the world and being the Craig Newmark of Internet access.

Suzanne Bowen: Makes me think of the relationship of this topic to my own company. When you come up with a new way to do things and change the way things are, this upsets some people. It’s better to get involved and collaborate. They would actually start making money among the changemaking, disruptive idea such as our DIDX. Type in my name and “Asterisk-Biz List.” Look at the earliest mentions of DIDX. It was total “dissing.” Like to them, I was the clone of Rehan, or an alias. There was no such thing as Suzanne.

Brough Turner: I certainly … you have to get out there and try different things for sure.

Suzanne Bowen: If people don’t learn anything else from this podcast, if you have an idea that may change things for the better, and you can make money on it… don’t be afraid. I’ve always said, “Collaborate with your competitor because in the long run, you both win.”

Brough Turner: My money is a result of the computer revolution through the 90s. That was literally a case of changing the way people built voice mail and first round telephony services.  To do that, we had all sorts of industry groups. To do the first digital T1 connected stuff in PCs, I helped creat a multi-vendor protocol that eventually had over 300 different companies  leveraging a digital TDM bus inside PC. That lasted about six years. Everything is completely obsolete now, but recently I was talking with Eric Giler, the founder of Brooktrout, a fax company in the 90s through 2005. We were head to head competitors at that time. We were partners at different points. Friends the whole time.

Suzanne Bowen: Would you share with us the milestones in your life and in the industry? Maybe you started with two cups and a wire connecting them?

Brough Turner: I always said you have to get me intoxicated to tell the phone hacking stories from college as an MIT undergraduate.

Suzanne Bowen: People would forgive you now.

Brough Turner: Then, when I graduated I worked for a little while with analytical instruments, doing Fourier transforms and other mathematical software.  In ‘83, I started a company with a couple other guys that eventually became Natural Microsystems and later NMS Communications. So I jumped into telephony professionally in ‘83. That’s where I’ve been ever since.

We had a consumer products company for the first few years. We raised VC money. Never could get the business beyond 2 million per year. Very disappointing for the investors. We turned into a consulting business to keep alive. Perhaps we should have walked away from it at that point and started over. That might have made the co-founders more money, but we had some responsibility to the investors. We managed to keep 22-25 employees during a lean period. We did large company contracting … anything to keep the doors open. Repositioned into computer-telephony … we went public in 1994 and boomed until Dec, 2000.

When the bubble burst, we scrambled and went into other businesses like within NMS optimizing backhaul from cellular towers. Another guy also within NMS started a business in mobile applications. We turned that into ringback tones in 2004… absolutely you can’t stand still. It’s fun when you are forced into a position where you have to learn a bunch of new things.

Suzanne Bowen: I agree. I was a teacher in my first real career. I accidentally stumbled into IP communications. That was a big mind shift, but I’m learning. I saw as a teacher that the Internet could transform what people are able to do.

Brough Turner: The impact in emerging markets is … I spent a lot of time selling in India and China… the backhaul optimization stuff was being used in Africa. You spend a lot of time in many parts of the world, too, Suzanne. Emerging markets first benefited from the spread of mobile phones and then Internet.

Suzanne Bowen: The infrastructure that we take for granted in the USA is almost not there in some emerging areas. We’ve noticed in our DIDX stats an increase in mobile companies and Asian, African and Middle Eastern providers.

Well, next time I see you we’ll have to have a real or virtual cocktail so we can get some more information out of you.

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