Retired colonel in quest to link all the world to the Net using radio frequencies

08/10/99

Interface

At 71, retired Army Col. Dave Hughes is still fighting. With his trademark Stetson, turquoise bolo tie and ebullient bluster, the Korean and Vietnam war veteran has spent his retirement years railing against the "electronic cockroaches" running telephone companies and incompetent bureaucrats who, he insists, are holding the country back from total Internet connectivity.

"I want to connect up all 5.75 billion brains on this planet," he says. And the best way to accomplish that goal, he says, is to harness advancements made in computers and spread spectrum radio.

Developed initially during World War II as a jamproof torpedo guidance system by actress Hedy Lamarr, spread spectrum devices transmit data in an unusual way. Rather than occupying a single frequency, they spread it across a range, hopping around in a pattern deciphered at the receiving end.

Recent advances in computer processor speeds have enabled production of low-wattage, no-license radio signals that travel 15 miles or more. In the last two years, some Internet service providers, including Austin's NoBell.com, have used spread spectrum wireless links to expand connectivity.

The technology is also now being offered in wireless telephone base stations hitting the consumer market.

Meanwhile, Col. Hughes has busied himself hooking up rural school districts and bringing connectivity to such remote locales as Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

In Col. Hughes' tireless vision, rural and urban America - and the rest of the world, for that matter - can be connected to the Internet using $2,000 radios at 15-mile intervals and high-speed connections. Freeing up spread spectrum for higher wattage and broader frequencies could revolutionize communications with little disruption, he says.

From his base (wireless.oldcolo.com) in the Old Colorado City District on the west side of Colorado Springs, Col. Hughes serves as a principal investigator for National Science Foundation projects, doing field tests on spread spectrum. He has served as consultant to both the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Federal Communications Commission in the use of wireless technology for education.

In 1998, Wired magazine named him to its Wired 25 list of the world's most important technological pioneers.

Col. Hughes was interviewed by staff writer Doug Bedell last week in Austin, where the longtime Internet denizen was addressing the Texas Community Network Conference.

DMN: You always start by telling people about Hedy Lamarr and her brilliant, patriotic groundwork on spread spectrum. That's a ploy, isn't it?

HUGHES: I use it because it's a shocker. You have to go through several levels of understanding with this technology. For many people, it is barely understandable. You start with something like ... [the Hedy story], and it's fierce in its curiosity. Then they can kind of understand why the Department of Defense used it for years because it was so good and secure.

Then you tell them there's a revolution going on. And everybody kind of understands that computer processors have gotten faster. You have to get through those levels. That's why I glommed onto the Hedy thing.

DMN: Basically, you believe the telephone companies are set up all wrong to bring universal broadband connections to the country. In fact, you told this Austin conference that costs of necessary hardware alone will prohibit installations in all but the most dense population centers. The only way it will ever work is with satellite and radios?

HUGHES: The telephone companies can't reach all of Texas with bandwidth. They just can't. The point is, it's tough. This DSL [high-speed digital subscriber line] - it's $150,000 for the switch you need. They're never going to get their money back on that - not in a town that doesn't have the population to ... support that kind of investment.

The phone company is a central investment, and it's also regulated, hands tied, fighting all kinds of regulators that tie up their costs, too. It's difficult for the phone companies to meet this need.

But they're never going to get to Dime Box, Texas. And Dime Box could be hooked up today by buying two radios. If it's too damned far away, ... hell, you can buy these radios and relay the thing from the closest ISP.

DMN: In Mongolia and other remote locales, you've had good results hooking these radios to satellite uplinks, effectively bringing Internet connections to places that will never be served by traditional telephone services. This kind of connectivity can be universal?

HUGHES: Technologically, we're already there. Economically, we're that close. Satellites can actually work. I think hooking up people is the core of this - not just people and institutions, but people to people. That little spread spectrum radio can do this. At 384 kilobits per second, it will do full-motion video. Wireless happens to be able to handle that. And the satellites are coming along.

DMN: For a Coloradan, you're particularly proud of Texas. Why is that?

HUGHES: I say, hell, the state of Texas put a gun in the ribs of the phone companies who said they wanted to be deregulated. Want to be deregulated? Well, Texas said, pay $1.5 billion into the pot. Not every phone company took up the deal, but most of them did.

Now you've got a pot of money in your Telecommunication Infrastructure Fund. And this isn't government money. It's ratepayer money.

But it's $1.5 billion over 10 years. At least now, in this state, some of that fund can be used for spread spectrum as an alternative to go from point to point.

DMN: Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and billionaire venture capitalist, and others seem to be heartened by the possibilities of high-speed, spread spectrum Internet connectivity. They're beginning to push for government regulations that would more fully unleash its potential, aren't they?

HUGHES: The problem is in Washington. The problem is in the FCC. They still don't get it ... It's not just domestic.

Stop and think about the 100 or so countries who have come after me to help them with this stuff. They're not going to be able to do it the way the U.S. did telephone service with wire. That spells export.

The U.S. is ahead in this area right now and could export this technology. And it's going to be the Canadians and the Israelis who beat us to the punch because it's in their public interest to make it work.

DMN: You believe if we're going to stay ahead, we've got to consider more applications for spread spectrum as soon as possible?

HUGHES: This is kind of a counterpart to the LAN [local area networks, which are used to link up computers in offices and homes]. With early LANs, the LAN installer had to come in.

Then, finally schools and institutions could learn that stuff. Their technicians could start to extend it. Now, they've learned LANs.

And I listen to them deal with this. They throw off terms like T1 [a high-speed data transmission cable] with a trip of the tongue. Three years ago, it was, "What the hell's a T1?" There's a level of learning.

And people don't realize they're becoming more technological just by using this stuff. Finally, a light will turn on and they start to realize what all this technology can do.

DMN: So now the National Science Foundation is giving you over a million dollars to go to the Puerto Rican jungle and other places to prove spread spectrum can transmit biological data from the most hostile climates?

HUGHES: It's heartless to spend a million dollars. It really is. But I'll find a way.

DMN: And you hope this latest NSF grant may help the spread spectrum cause even further, I'm sure.

HUGHES: Right. I will be doing this in the rain forest, broadcasting the sounds of the coqui frog to be heard anywhere in the world on the Internet.

I hope people will go, "Whoa! Wireless what? How's that being done?" And then they may begin to think and really look into it.

This is a diffusion of technology that is grass roots up, not top down. I'm giving the damned ideas away. I could have gotten rich a long time ago with all this. But I don't need to. I'm a retired Army colonel.