There are an endless number of conferences out there, many of them quite good. But there is one conference I never skip if I can possibly make it — the International Summit For Community Wireless.

Why? You won't find billion dollar CEOs or announcements of major product releases or huge deals. This year, owing to its location in Washington D.C., there will be some very good speakers (such as FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein — one of the great friends of community wireless at the Commission). And I and fellow Washington public interest conspirators will be hatching our plots for the new Administration. But that's not why this is, in my opinion, the most important conference I attend.

This conference is the biggest collection of people I know who do things — and talk about them without worrying about non-disclosure agreements. These are the folks providing wireless connectivity in urban neighborhoods were folks can't afford DSL; or who have figured out how to store, share and tag local content on wifi network in a safe manner that transforms a hot spot from an access point to the internet to a source of rich local media. It's where I can hear about the innovations in mesh or deployment that are taking place on a daily basis as people deploy systems and play with equipment and code. It's where I learned about how a city in Chile is improving the efficiency of city services because they asked local people “what is your biggest problem that we can solve with a wifi network” and the answer was “empty the garbage dumpsters when they get full.” It's a place to find out how people are changing lives with unlicensed wireless technologies, and coordinating better how to get that story told.

For me, it gives meaning to my work. Because what I do doesn't mean jack unless it actually changes people's lives. (You can see the speech I gave at the second Summit on Community Wireless here, and here the speech I gave last year here (feel free to skip the intro by Sascha, which contains reference to things that never happened and I was somewhere else at the time so it could not have been me anyway.) But for everyone else, whether you are a policy wonk who wants to see how spectrum policy changes people's lives, or a technogeek looking for cool toys, or a venture capitalist scouting for the next Big Thing to come out of the weeds, this is the place to be.

Fourth International Summit on Community Wireless Networking
May 28-30
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
1200 New York Ave NW
Washington, DC 20005

Stay tuned . . . .

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

--Obligatory Cliche Neitsche Quote

When last we left Sprint, the wily temptress of the airwaves, she was languorously sighing while apparently choosing between her old suitors (refugees from Spectrum Co. Comcast, Time Warner, and Brighthouse) and her new suitors (Google and Intel). Now, according to this announcement, the ever outre and winsome Sprint has decided it is too much trouble to choose and that — like some French comedy — they will live happily ever after in some carefree, open spectrum menage a cinq. Google, as has become its want, explains on its blog how this signals a new era in which all Americans will enjoy a third wireless pipe, open applications, and — no doubt — greater independence from foreign oil.

Well I hope so. But after seeing Google break my poor little heart in the 700 MHz auction after I was so utterly convinced they would bid to win, I am very definitely reserving judgment here. Because while I keep hoping that this is all part of Google acting to alter the wireless world by making it more open, I cannot overlook the possibility that this is the world of giant corporate incumbents altering Google to be less of a threat. So even though Google is saying all the right things, I'm going to wait to see the FCC applications before I start jumping up and down for joy and declaring this a huge victory. Because electronic press releases mean squat compared to whether the applications for the new “Clearwire” entity contain provisions that provide the same level of openness as the C Block Conditions or the Skype Petition.

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