WISP consulting beginning

I have been involved with the WISP community for the last 15 Years, and I will highlight some of those activities.  I started out following Part 15 Mailing lists, and saw the potential for network accessibility, which is a major step expanding LAN to more of a WAN environment.  It expands a private network over a large geographic area (almost like a WAN) using wireless technology to connect customer locations to the providers network.


I started working for PDQ Link installing Access Points on Towers, and CPE devices art customer premises.  I helped with several trade shows (WISPCON). 


The first wireless devices deployed were Devices designed around the Orinoco Silver and gold PCMCIA cards.  They had a limitation of 26mW.  I also worked with Motorola Canopy devices, and the next one were the SmartBridges devices that were 200mW.


My second wireless consulting client is still in the WISP business.  Nathan and Jason from WISPER had me install their first Canopy cluster on a tower in Fairview Heights   I mat Charles Wu the trade shows, and he trained me with a Comtrain certification for tower climbing.  I installed some microwave gear for him as a part of the Kankakee County 911 system.  I also climbed my first mono-pole tower near the Joliet raceway.  I then started working with Larry Yunker at Cyber Broadcasting doing tower and customer installs.  We installed about a dozen tower locations and about 200 customer installs the first year.  Larry sold the company to a local competitor, and I moved on to several regional freelance locations, until I started working consistently with WISPER expanding their Metro St. Louis footprint.  I also did some specialized point to point high capacity links with Orthogon and Canopy Back-haul products for a regional Health Care Group.  I started working part time as an employee for WISPER, traveling from my home town of Coal Valley, IL. to metro St. Louis for a couple of years.

The beginning of consulting

I started consulting and networking around 1993, with some database programming projects, until I moved to northern Missouri and worked for a plastics manufacturer that was a subsidiary of Union Carbide.  I also started teaching adult education classes for a local community college. I did some computer sales and service, hiring a tech. My consulting group covered service, programming and sale for the southern Iowa and North Central Missouri area.

The next  project came from the teaching contacts for an Iowa Utility company.

I did a pilot programming project for the Iowa Southern Utilities Southern region while still teaching college courses over several southern Iowa locations.

This project required an outside energy consulting group to meet and review the database design. I was competing with another region of the newly formed electrical company when ISU and IES (Cedar Rapids IA.) merged and they also had a similar project. Cedar Rapids was the now parent company, and their project won out the project.  I was dialing in to the NWS for climate data to be calculated in my program.  This was the beginning of the Internet, and dial in was to the Iowa Climate Data to download weather data.

 Next I tried full time consulting with Baird Kurtz and Dobson CPA IT side. We had over 200 employees in the Kansas City office with 14 offices in the Midwest.  One project that consumed most of my billable hours was to provide IT support for a transportation broker.  They had a contract with FORD motor company to provide rail transportation substitution for a few months because of a rail car shortage.  I programmed an interface to call into Ford's COPAC system and receive and transmit vehicle deliveries.  I the few months, the company received several million dollars in fees tor transporting the remaining vehicles for the model year to two locations from Kansas City to Tulsa OK, and Santa Fe NM.

Next I was hired by some friends I met while teaching C Programming at the community college. I worked on several programming projects supervising a team of programmers and analysts.  We started a project to become dial-up service provider with a target project for the Iowa Farm Bureau to provide a frame relay network across the state of Iowa.  We started with two locations as a proof of concept in Des Moines and Ottumwa. I worked on several Cisco router ate Access points, and several providing the backbone across the frame relay network. I was hearing new things about wireless networking, and looked into this concept.