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John Wilson's Guru Spot -The wireless revolution: US pioneer Dave Hughes
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John Wilson's Guru Spot
ABC co-founder John Wilson owes his wireless mentorship to patriotic American-Welshman Dave Hughes of Colorado, a pioneer of no-license wireless. [See www.johnwilsonweb.com/broadband for videos of Dave Hughes in Colorado, and the "Connecting Keokuk" case study of wireless broadband in rural Iowa]. John has recently been elected Chair of the Wales BSG's Wireless SIG sub-group - watch this space for the forthcoming "Wireless Broadband in the Nations and Regions" conference.
John is excited at this latest posting on the Net by Dave Hughes. "It's typical of Dave to endeavour to bring advanced connectivity to schoolchildren in remote areas", says John, "and they don't come much remoter than the Sherpa community of Thame, 13,000 feet up Everest!"
From: Dave Hughes
Organization: Old Colorado City Communications
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:48:59 -0700
Great success at the big SXSW Conference in Austin today. The
'Interactive' (meaning mostly wireless) gathering for 4 solid days in
the huge Austin Convention Center had a parade of wireless luminaries.
(Even that crazy John Perry Barlow had one of his blast Saturday night
costume parties) Less a 'tech' conference than an 'applications'
extravaganza.
I was on for an hour this morning doing a solo Powerpoint presentation
about all the wireless I have done the past several years, including
the Mr Everest expedition, AND where I am going next.
The capstone of my presentation was my first attempt ever, from the
podium with just a windows laptop with its built in microphone and
speaker (fed out to the PA system) and the big screen, to actually dial
out Voice over IP SIP protocol from just a Free (downloadable) software
program (www.freeworldialup.com) all the way, wirelessly in the
Convention Center, out to net, cross to Hawaii, TWO satellite IP hops
with 1,200 millisecond latency through Kathmandu to Namche, Nepal at
12,000 feet on the slopes of Everest to Santosh in Tsering Sherpa¹s
Cyber Café who answered with a Cisco hardware (and not cheap) VOIP!
And we chatted fully understandably by everyone in the audience for a
few minutes. Half way around the world (and 12 hours time difference
11AM Austin, 11PM Mount Everest). Damned thing worked!!!!!!
THAT is a tour de force folks!
We will NOW be able to get those Sherpa kids in poor Thame, up there
at 13,000 feet, to start chattering away with American kids - to learn
English in which BOTH end will just need the freeworlddialup free
program on their school PCs, and the 5 miles unlicensed wireless link to
Namche, and its broadband connection to the internet. THEY WONT NEED
COSTLY IP PHONES! Just wirelessly connected PCs or PDAs to talk
worldwide, free to ANYONE connected to the net with a PC. No switched
telephone network involved, ala Vonage and XXXX per month.
That solution is replicable all over the world!!!
Dave Hughes
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