Dave Hughes is an Internet legend. A career military man from Colorado Springs, he got involved in Internet issues over 20 years ago, starting with his Old Colorado City BBS. Later, he got involved in wireless, and he’s still involved in wireless.
He was introduced by Gordon Cook, Editor of The Cook Report.
Gordon Cook
Forget Washington. In my opinion it’s hopeless. It’s collaboration and cooperation.
It’s not pretty please Mr. Duopoly may I run my applications on your network.
Let me introduced two books.
The first is Michael Bookey’s America at the Internet Crossroads – written to explain the Internet to the average city councilman and explain why it’s a road system that is vital to the community, LANs that connect out. Someone needs to print a million of these in paperback and distribute them.
The second is Tom Vest’s The Wealth of Networks . This is the most important stuff I’ve seen in the 15 years I’ve done my newsletter. IT’s a specific study of what happens in an Internet ecology if you do it right. It’s how the U.S. becams the leading Internet nation in the 1990s. If you look at his methodology you will see we have done a u-turn and we’re going into the direction of the kind of network they have in mainland China, a state-controlled system
It’s time to build networks and let Ivan and Ed suck on empty pipes. Twenty years ago Dave threatened a 20 million modem march if the Feds screwed it up, and they have screwed it up,
Dave Hughes
Citizens have a right to communicate. It’s a right of speech. To the extent the Internet is an extension of our speech we have a right to it.
Tom Paine would have published Common Sense on a pirate bulletin board and I don’t want any government King Georges treading on my cursor. We must have absolute freedom of electronic speech. I said that 20 some years ago.
Engineers know how. I know why.
I had to do unlicensed, and went into the literature, and found someone I knew, Hedy Lamarr, had invented what we know as WiFi. It was a patent from 1942. She used a paper tape and piano roll to synchronize signals. She wanted to work as an inventor, she didn’t want to be an actress. I nominated her for an Electronic Frontier Foundation award, and she got fame at 83. Because this was classified, military spread spectrumm until 1985, when in a fit of absent-mindedness, the FCC got into it.
They wouldn’t let, for 40 years, the Defense Department have spread spectrum frequency hopping on commercial radios. They didn’t want bad guys on the East Coast hearing bad guys on the West Coast in a way that couldn’t be intercepted.
It was unlicensed, free FREE. FREE!
Devices are incidental. It’s not a service business.
That is a world revolution.
I’m sorry Reed Hundt isn’t here right now because I’d be right in
his face. In 1998 I told him the school library fund to connect 16,000
school districts, no school could use that fund to buy a radio, and
therefore they had to pay to install T-1s to every school.
As a result 15 years was lost connecting up Ameica’s youth.
Where the hell are 5-10 teenagers in your conferences. They’re the
future, they’re the ones, you better get some or I’ll be on your case.
Just go out on Google, you’ll find them.
Isenberg – Let’s do it!
Hughes — I moved into Skype because it requires low bandwidth and
has superior voice quality. I have people dialing up with PPP and
talking to me.
Instead of educating the kids with wireless, I hooked up Sherpa
School kids on Mt., Everest instead. I trekked in, donated radios, and
got a guy to open a cyber café at 18,500 with WiFi from Cisco. But it
was about hooking up the kids. I’m doing more for Sherpa kids with VOIP
and satellite than I’m doing for American kids.
Mahibar Pun at NepalWireless.Net connected 11 villages in
Nepal with WiFi. He was threatened that he’d be killed if he talked
about how the teachers are being executed.
(Hughes then proceeded to dial Mahibar’s number from his PC, using Skype, and Mahibar picked up, from deep in the Himalayas.
Hughes: Where are you?
Mahibar Pun: I’m in a small town.
Hughes: Why are you doing this when the Maoists threatened your life?
Mahibar
Pun: I set up network for communucation in the villages, but later we
found it could be used for getting on the Internet. We can use it for
local e-commerce and to sell products from the local market. We use
these for communicatoin with the host.
(Hughes opened up a chat
screen) – This is his organization — Himanchal.org – it’s a 501c3,
tax-deductible for U.S. donations.
Hughes: Pun goes out every day. He has a 5
kilowatt generator. The Maoists seize it to recharge their cell phones.
He connects the villagers to a doctor. He rang me up in the middle of
yesterday. He walked 60 kilometers where the Maoists have blocked all
the roads and the Nepalese government has shut down the telephone
system. If it wasn’t for Skype, IP and over the Net, we wouldn’t have
anything.
Mahibar Pun: This network really has been a lifeline for us.
(Hughes and Pun then said goodbye.)
There’s two reasons why things go wrong in the corporate
world or government. Half of it is conspiracy double dealing backdoor
lobbying. The other is the great American tradition of utter
incompetence. Make sure you know the difference. Even though I wrote
McNamara’s 1966 speech on Vietnam the fact is the answer to the
Internet future is civil, technological disobedience. Just keep
inventing out beyond the laws, like VOIP was, and the regulators will
never catch up with you.
