Madison Builds Wireless Network: "The real importance is the sources of information we can get access to that we can't get access to today," says Madison Police Department Records, Planning and Technology Director, Joe Balles. Balles says the more help they get they better they can help the public. 'If your firefighter and police officers got current information out there they're going to be a better service.'"

The county says that this $6,000,000 project is to improve communications between police, firefighters and first responders, but it does not allow a single Sauk County resident to communicate. The CIC has no plans to deploy high-speed, low cost wireless Internet access points in the county! Instead of building a network that everyone in the county can use including schools, businesses, cities, towns, residents AND first responders, they are using our limited public funds to invest in their aging communications technologies.

Why is the county's network the wrong network? Because they are building nine expensive, large 250 foot big towers connected with expensive, buried, high capacity 96-strand fiber-optic cables to support 6 different antennas for 9 different aging, proprietary (non-Internet-based) communications protocols. The county has said that they will never use more than 12 of 96 the fibers. This network will be expensive to build and maintain and will be under-utilized (only county employees can use it instead of every resident). Its physical configuration will not be compatible with the latest Internet standards-based configuration consisting of many inexpensive base stations (802.16 WiMax) mounted on existing water towers, utility poles, rooftops and silos connected through the air instead of buried cables. The county will be forced to continue to use old technology well into the future because of their large new investment. They will also be hard-pressed to find more money to build the alternative public wireless network in a year or two when the public realizes that Sauk County is falling behind while others the rush to wireless by every other county and city in the country.

In the September 8 Spring Green News article about the CIC meeting it states, "County administrator Gene Wiegand noted that the county's communications towers will be linked by fiber optic cable with excess capacity to accommodate other uses, including high-speed Internet access for county residents that are not served by commercial providers."

The county's fiber-optic plan was done two years ago, but technology has changed since then. The county had planned on leasing the excess fiber optic cables to commercial companies, but now 802.16 WiMax wireless technology may have made that plan obsolete. The 802.16 specification was approved by the IEEE in June 2003 after the county's study was done.. The expensive fiber optic network will never be used to its full capacity and will not produce any revenue for the county to offset the $6,000,000 they are spending. How will the fiber optic cable ever provide rural residents access to the Internet? No company is going to bury cable from the highway to people's homes in the country! The only way rural homes will get high-speed access is through 802.11/802.16 wireless devices, but these devices will be deployed along the highway in the air above the buried $6,000,000 of taxpayers money.

The county is spending $3,500,000 on the fiber optics cabling alone. But the county has not lined up any commitments for private companies to use the unused fiber capacity. The telephone companies could possibly use extra fiber cable, but they certainly cannot justify the cost of laying it themselves. As a result, after the county buries this cable the telephone companies can lease this extra capacity for dirt-cheap rates because they will have the county over a barrel. The telephone companies do not have to use the county cable, so they can wait until the county basically gives it to them for next to nothing. Thus the county makes no money, the telephone company services are subsidized by the tax payers and the telephone companies get to charge the residents and businesses for their new service offerings. The county taxpayers then pay twice for any new services. This is another reason the county is building the wrong network. They could build a network that every resident could OWN and USE for free or very low cost!

Madison Builds Wireless Network: "We've been studying this issue for almost a year now,' says Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. He says Madison is at the forefront of WiFi technology. Not only does that mean people could soon access the Internet from anywhere but it also could be used as an important economic development tool."

Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US are outsourced to India every year. The reason this can happen is because India has invested in high-speed access to the Internet. It is time that Sauk County upgrades our public communications infrastructure from third-world status. The supervisors on the CIC need to be contacted by YOU, today! Or else we will be commuting to India for our jobs tomorrow.

The economic fact that has eluded the CIC so far is that use of the Internet is free. It is access that costs. Your dial-up ISP has to buy and maintain modems for your modem to connect to our your phone line. That is what you are charged for every month. Dial-up accounts could charge $20-$40 dollars a month for the past ten years because for many people that was the only way they could connect to the Internet from home or small businesses. Because this was the only way many people could access the Internet they could charge a lot because they had a temporary monopoly on access. Those connections are so slow that they are only useful for surfing the web and sending/receiving emails. Next came the cable TV companies who ran cable to every home. They could provide you with access to the Internet that was faster than the dial-up connections offered by ISPs. Faster cable and DSL access enables new uses of the Internet like downloading music and videos. Until a year or so ago this was the only way for you to get high-speed access to the Internet from your home or small business. That is why they can charge you $30-$50 a month for this faster access. Again, this was another temporary monopoly on fast access in the marketplace. Whether your access was slow or fast, you paid only for access. Once connected you could use the Internet all day for free.

Now however, wireless technology, has changed the market conditions again. Now you do not have to pay a company high monthly fees for access to the Internet. You can now purchase an inexpensive device, about $200 or less, that you own. This device broadcasts and receive over a wide area allowing your other devices like your computer and other devices to communicate directly with the Internet. Since you own the equipment that provides you access so the Internet, the Internet is FREE forever.

Not only does the Internet become free, but your access is no longer slow, it becomes very fast and the speed will only increase every year as the technology improves. These wireless devices are built using the same technology as your computer. They will also get more powerful, faster, and cheaper each year. Since all businesses, governments, schools are moving to this technology, many millions of devices will be sold thus driving the price down and the performance up every year. That is why this technology is strategic. If you invest in anything else today you will be wasting your money.

There is only one more thing is needed, your wireless device on your house needs to be in range of another device that is connected to the Internet. That is where Sauk County comes in. The county needs to build a network that provides these initial high-speed base stations around the county. Then your device will be connected to the Internet. The county does not even have to deploy their access points everywhere in the county because when you deploy your device it can extend the coverage of the wireless network to your nearest neighbor who will now be able to deploy their device and so on. This is why the CIC is deploying the wrong network. With the same amount of money they are spending on a network that no resident can use, they could be a single wireless network that everyone can use.

High-speed connections to the Internet have significant implications for our lives. Ten years ago when the Internet became a public craze the term "digital convergence" began to be thrown around. People quickly realized that if there was a single high-speed network that everyone had access to then we could replace the many different networks with one. For example, telephones, pagers, radio, music, video, cable TV, etc. This dream fueled the dot.com economic boom of the 1990's. The stock market went off the charts, billions of dollars were made, millions of jobs were created. But then the boom went bust. The reason for this was simple, the high-speed access to every home in the country never happened. Everyone did not get high-speed access. Many high-speed fiber-optic cables were laid across the country and across the world, but no one could afford to lay the "last-mile" of cable to your home. It cost too much. So many corporations could advantage of these high-speed trunks, but it never made it to every home and small business. The company I work for and most other major corporations already are using digital phones that use Internet Protocol (IP). In other words the phones are little computers that talk over an Internet network instead of the the plain old telephone that has not changed for almost a hundred years.

WSJ Business 9/5/04: "Most businesses have some program around this now; it's much more mainstream than a year ago," especially for companies with more than one location, Scheckel said. "As their traditional (phone network) comes off lease, they are usually moving those to IP (Internet Protocol) telephony systems."

The introduction of high-speed wireless devices into your home will allow you take take advantage of capabilities that already exist but you could never use. Imagine if you had the dream of picture phones, not only in your home, but anywhere you went. You could work for a company anywhere in the US without leaving home. You could talk, see and communicate as easily from your home as from an office somewhere else. This wireless capability will provide job opportunities every where in Sauk County that do not currently exist. Wireless technology will reignite the economic development that started ten years ago and came to a crashing halt. This partially explains the economic slump our economy has been in for the past four years.

The price of gasoline has risen drastically recently making commuting to work more expensive. The cause of these price increases is not simply disruptions caused by the war in Iraq. For the past three years 5 of the 17 largest oil producing nations have been producing less oil, from 10%-15% less. Three years ago world production of oil peaked and has been decreasing. At the same time consumption of oil in third world nations, especially China where all our our manufacturing jobs have gone, is drastically increasing. The fact is that oil prices will not go down. They will continue to increase. The cost of commuting to work will take a larger and larger amount out of our paychecks. Our earnings will continue to decrease to the point that we will be forced to leave the county. There is no replacement for energy to replace gasoline in our cars. However, high-speed communications do offer a real alternative to driving farther and farther to jobs that pay less and less. High-speed communications can provide an increase in our quality of life and standard of living and take pressures off the exploitation of our natural environment.

Madison Builds Wireless Network: "Wireless Internet is already available on the UW campus. Two years ago, the university established 30 access locations. Although it was a big undertaking, those involved say it was well worth it."

The transformations possible by high-speed communications also include our schools and education systems. Education can be improved and made available to everyone for less money if we have the proper infrastructure. We will not be able to afford to spend more for less forever. Our taxes are already an unbearable burden for many county residents. We currently face a dilemma of increasing taxes and decreasing earnings. The CIC's $6,000,000 project only accelerates this dilemma.

Living in a rural environment like Sauk County with natural treasures like the Lower Wisconsin Riverway is a way of life to protect and preserve. Investing properly in our infrastructure is critical for our way of life. You must get involved and contact these supervisors to make sure they the latest technology before spending the $6,000,000.

Below are some recent articles that demonstrate some of the ideas mentioned above.

Free Public Wireless Access to the Internet in Sauk County, Why Not?