The degree to which provider perceptions of FWBA have changed was apparent as recently as last July at the Wireless Communications Association (WCA) conference in New Orleans, a showcase for wireless access technologies. "I've been going to WCA for five years, and I've never seen anything like this year's show. The boom is starting now," Audeh said.

The attention given to WCA was most gratifying for Audeh, who cut his teeth on wireless systems "way back" (in Internet time) in 1995 while working as principal member of the technical staff at Telesis Technologies Laboratory, the advanced technology division of Pacific Telesis in the Los Angeles basin. A recent graduate of the University of California-Berkeley, with a PhD in Electrical Engineering and a specialty in wireless communications, Audeh at the time was focused on what was to be a dead-end proposition-digital video broadcasting using the licensed, one-way, multichannel, multipoint distribution system (MMDS) at 2.5 GHz.

"This was at the time that Bell Atlantic, Nynex and Pacific Bell were doing video as a team. Cable companies were trying to do phones, and phone companies were trying to do video. It eventually all went kaput," Audeh said.

The plan at the time, however, was to offer digital video in the L.A. basin. "I worked on a lot of advanced technologies, a lot of forward-looking things as they were being launched, and was solving problems that occurred as the video service was launched," he said.

Audeh's knack for picking forward-looking technologies dates back to his college days. Back then, communications methods had always grabbed his interest, which helped him do well in his classes. When the time came to pick a project for his PhD thesis, looking forward became his modus operandi. "I wanted to do a communications project and found wireless to be the most interesting," namely indoor infrared, Audeh said. "At the time we were doing things one hundred times that of IrDA. We're talking cutting-edge, high-speed, indoor IR."

While aware of infrared's advantages in terms of cost and ease of use, Audeh was equally aware of its limitations when it came to range and its ability to see through walls. Radio waves could overcome those limitations, though, and that idea attracted Audeh.

His interest in RF and his experience with cutting-edge technology would pay off in the mid-1990s. While working with Pacific Telesis on video over MMDS, he recognized the potential benefits of MMDS for the Internet market. "Real-time data applications were huge, and MMDS was a way to deliver that. And without ripping up the entire street, an especially prohibitive proposition for the L.A. basin," he said.

MMDS would have been ideal, Audeh said, except for one thing: It was one-way only. So Audeh took the lead in Pacific Telesis' membership in the five-company "Ticket 2" consortium that drafted the original petition to the FCC to open the MMDS spectrum to two-way operation. "When it passed, it changed everything, by allowing for flexible use of MMDS spectrum for two-way broadband data and other enhanced services," Audeh said. Little did he know, but his own life was about to change as well, as he pitched his tent in front of the Internet tornado by joining Hybrid Networks Inc. in October 1997.

Hybrid's heritage in the market is a major asset in the face of a slew of recently announced solutions from providers offering systems to prospective operators since the Sprint/WorldCom validation of MMDS. Many of these providers have rushed to market with designs based on a data over cable system interface specification (Docsis) media-access-control (MAC) layer that was originally designed for cable modems. "That's a mistake," Audeh said.

The decision to use the Docsis MAC was based on time-to-market considerations, in light of how many of these companies were coming late to the table to begin with. However, "that MAC is not designed for the wireless air interface," Audeh said. "Cable connections don't have to deal with fading, frequencies moving, multipath and the like. That's what's different. It boils down to the MAC and physical layer and how they tie together. If they tie together too much, that can be a problem. We coupled ours, so they don't link together so tightly."

Audeh added that to date, no one has yet deployed a Docsis system, and so no one has entered the learning curve and iterative process that Hybrid has been through already. "When it comes to scaling a network for thousands of users, there are issues in the way those Docsis protocols work that need to be investigated a lot more thoroughly. I don't know how it works; no one's done a 4,000-plus deployment like we have in Phoenix. They've gotten nowhere near that. I believe when they do, they'll have issues."

As FWBA proliferates, Audeh sees it seriously affecting the Internet backbone itself. "Broadband wireless will definitely increase traffic, thereby slowing down the backbone even more. Today I see the slow backbone manifest itself; a Web page can be slow to download from our system not because of our system, but because it has to make its way through the Internet." Next-generation technologies will clear the bottleneck, he said, by speeding up the routing and giving the high-speed experience people want. "But the demand for bandwidth, and fixed-wireless' ability to scale to that demand, will also go up." And the cycle will continue.

Audeh misses the good-old days, though. "I was part of a team that installed the first two-way system in Phoenix with the people now running the Sprint system. That was a lot of fun. We got to see it at the very beginning, the first two-way subscriber. I was there when we did it. Now it's so different. You just go pop them into systems all over the country and they just work beautifully. Plug and play-it's almost too easy." Malik Audeh, an engineer's engineer.