Today at the Berkman Center, Dewayne Hendricks of the Dandin Group led a 1.5 hr presentation/discussion of California’s Gigabit or Bust Initiative and the general state of massive wifi connectedness. Dewayne has been setting up large (really large) wireless networks in Tonga and Mongolia where the regulatory environment is – let’s say – looser than here in the US. Thus, he can put technologies to the test that are caught in political bear traps in this country. Fascinating.

The gigabit initiative intends to deliver 1 gigabit access to all Californians by 2010. Dewayne is convinced that only wireless will do it because the wire-based infrastructure is dominated by incumbents who don’t much like the idea that citizens will use, say, VoIP via wifi instead of their services. But Dewayne thinks it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen fast: citizens and municipalities will create wireless networks bringing high-speed connectivity at low costs. He seems especially excited about the bottom-up networks. Yeah, who isn’t, but this is a guy who’s providing services aross island archipelagos and thus has a bit more experience than people like me who hang a wifi box outside their 2nd floor window and feel like they’re now a People’s ISP.

Afterwards, there was a spirited discussion of how the clouds over municipalities will connect. Within the cloud, people are sharing data peer to peer at tremendous speeds. But to go from my cloud to your cloud, we either need an intermediary cloud (which may take a while to develop) or some sort of backbone. How’s it going to work? Dewayne thinks that there is technology on the way that will span enough distance to let clouds talk to clouds. (Cue Joni Mitchell.)

A couple of interesting Nuggets o’ Fact: Apparently 66% of global Net traffic is p2p, and 60% of that is video. in the US, 80% of traffic is video. Globally, only 11% of traffic is the Web.

Some urls I jotted down from Dewayne’s talk:

HPwren

sflan

SocialFreeNet

Note: All mistakes in the above characterization of Dewayne’s ideas are due to the denseness of the filter between him and you.

Categories: Uncategorized dw