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Beaming the Internet on Portland to change how we go online—especially for University classes.

Jon Snyder and Kris Amundson were on a mission.

Driving around Portland in an unmarked car one sunny afternoon, they stopped periodically, got out of the car, and held forth antennas. Like desert settlers looking for water, they were divining the air for . . . what?

That's what the neighbors wanted to know. Before you could say, "Can you hear me now?" a Portland police car arrived on the scene.

"We think you're trying to steal Internet access," the cops told them.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Snyder and Amundson, network technology experts at Portland State, are more interested in giving than receiving. The two are local experts in the new technology called WiMAX, a method of delivering Internet service through the air rather than through wires. It's cheap. It's powerful. And in a few years it could forever change the way the world goes online.

Called "the next big thing" by Newsweek, WiMAX is scheduled to hit the market by 2005. It uses some of the same technology as Wi-Fi—the wireless way you can cruise the Web at your local Starbucks or other Internet "hot spots." But WiMAX broadcasts signals in a much longer range. While Wi-Fi can cover a building or two, WiMAX can offer wireless connectivity at up to 30 miles in wide-open spaces, or a mile or two in a typical urban setting.

It's also wickedly fast. While a typical cable modem brings in data at just over 1 million bits per second (mbps), WiMAX is expected to deliver data at speeds of up to 75 mbps.

Because it's wireless, it's being looked at as the ultimate low-cost way to bring high-speed Internet to people who have never been able to get it before. Today, if you want DSL, your telecommunications company must find a way to make a hard connection between your home and their main copper, cable, or fiber networks. This "last mile" of connection can be expensive, and in some places is not available at all. WiMAX does away with the "last mile" problem; it can beam the signals virtually anywhere at a fraction of the hard-wired cost.

"It's the perfect technology for last mile," says Snyder, a network and systems team leader in PSU's Office of Information Technologies.

What Snyder and Amundson were doing on that fateful day was testing a signal broadcast from a network transmitter they rigged up on the roof of PSU's Ondine residential hall with the support of Mark Gregory, executive director of the Office of Information Technologies. They could pick up the signal as far away as Southeast 18th and Hawthorne Boulevard—not bad for starters, especially since the Ondine is not a tall building and the broadcast path has a few large condos in the way.

The PSU team is in the beginning stages of researching the potential for WiMAX use in Portland. The project has piqued the interest of officials with the city of Portland and Oregon Health & Science University, both of which eagerly offered to partner in the project. WiMAX could eventually play a major role in how emergency personnel in the two entities communicate. It could also revolutionize the way distance learning classes are delivered to thousands of PSU students.

Such great potential for Portland. But if you want to understand the real source of this effort, you have to look farther south. Ecuador, to be exact.

About three years ago, Gregory and Snyder were giving a tour of PSU to representatives from a university in Ecuador. The group was particularly interested in PSU's distance learning center and the ways in which the University was teaching classes through videoconferencing over the Internet. They wanted to do the same for their students, or at least improve the way they had been doing distance education, which was to send out tapes and books to distance learning students. They kept in touch with Gregory and Snyder, and last December paid for them to visit their campus.

What Gregory and Snyder saw on their visit was a potentially ideal setting for WiMAX technology, but one with plenty of challenges, too.

The 18,000 students attending the Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja are divided between the main campus, situated in the high Andes at more than 6,000 feet elevation, and remote, rugged areas, including jungle villages accessible only by boat.

"There aren't many economically viable options for Internet delivery down there," says Gregory, pointing out the high cost and impracticality of bringing "last mile" service to what a typical telecommunications company might consider the edge of civilization. But even the faculty at the main campus have it rough. The campus's satellite access to the Internet costs 100 times what Portlanders pay, Gregory says.

WiMAX was a new, not-yet-official networking standard, but Gregory and Snyder knew it held promise. They recommended that the Ecuadorians look into building a network of WiMAX devices that could link cities to remote sites. At the same time, they decided to see what they could do to advance WiMAX testing and use in Portland.

On their return to Portland, the pair gave a call to Nigel Ballard, one of the primary movers in area wireless efforts and a leader in a nonprofit organization called Personal Telco, which has built more than 100 Wi-Fi "hotspots" around Portland. Ballard helped them acquire six early release Airspan WiMAX devices and put them in touch with other area organizations that were excited about the possibilities of WiMAX for their own needs.

Matt Lampe, chief technology officer for the city of Portland, says the city is sharing its own WiMAX research with PSU. He says the city has a pressing need for a lot more bandwidth to connect employees at more than 90 locations, and WiMAX may be the best way to get it. Mobile WiMAX, which is years down the road, will make police and firefighters much more effective in doing their jobs, he says. For example, firefighters could receive information before they enter a building on whether that structure contains hazardous materials.

Led by a PSU and OHSU partnership, the group researching WiMAX obtained a $10,000 grant from the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium, whose principal request was that the group share its findings via a Web site. At this point, the group's aim is to find out how far and wide the radio signal can reach from the toaster-size box on the Ondine. It also wants to see if devices could be run by solar cells and batteries.

If PSU is to someday devise a WiMAX system that can effectively reach the homes of the thousands of students who take PSU's Internet-based courses, it will need multiple hubs and relay points that will combine WiMAX with the shorter-range and more common Wi-Fi technology. Student use of this technology across Portland is a goal that will take a few years to fulfill, Gregory says.

One of the first stepping stones on that path will be reached this fall when standardized WiMAX products start to emerge. In fact, it's a bit premature to call any of this long-range wireless broadcasting WiMAX. Everyone involved in this realm is working with pre-certified versions. The real deal—the thing everyone will be able to officially call WiMAX—is scheduled to debut this fall and will make the technology and its components cheaper and more widely available.

One local private company is poised for that moment. VeriLAN, a six-employee firm with a wireless hub on the KGW-TV tower, claims to be the first company in the nation to deploy the pre-certified technology. Company president Steven Schroedl says VeriLAN serves businesses in a 10- to 12-mile radius from the tower, and will be able to branch into the residential market when prices come down.

Portland already has a reputation as one of the top five "unwired" cities in the country because of its many Wi-Fi networks, according to PSU's Amundson. With so many hands working on WiMAX, that position could go up a notch or two.

John Kirkland, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the articles "Engineering the Future" and "Breaking Through" in the spring 2004 PSU Magazine.