Fixed Wireless Business

Jack Knows the Way to San Jose

Jack Unger, wireless educator, led a full-day Sunday session at ISPCON. He's on the road now, teaching all the time, looking forward to the Wi-Fi Planet Conference & Expo in December.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 25, 2003]

When we reach Jack Unger, president of Wireless Infonet, it's by phone at a hotel room. It's 7 AM on the West Coast (10 AM for us, lucky us). He's tired but enthusiastic. "It's been two weeks on the road," he says.

We last saw Unger in person at ISPCON's day-long Sunday session (so, yes, he works Sundays too). Unger works hard. The session was scheduled to run from 9 AM to 5 PM. It ran longer.

It was informative and useful. We left with a copy of Unger's book as well as a binder containing the massive powerpoint that he uses as his class outline, and in which we took our notes. We have not counted the pages, but the book contains material for several days' worth of classes.

"Three days would be really nice," Unger says. "We could stop during explanations and really do exercises." Applying knowledge as it is taught would help students remember what they had learned.

"But between you and I, what I really want to do is to create an entire curriculum to certify people in WAN engineering. But I'd need to stop traveling long enough to do that. There are financial and time constraints. I don't have another 2,000 hours to write another book. I'd like it to be scholarly. I'd like to create educational material and send it out."

Education, Unger feels, is important to the industry because most problems, such as erroneous CPE deployments and interference on access points, can be traced to accidental interference that could have been avoided had the installers and network designers known more.

The day long course starts with the basics, which includes going over vocabulary, progresses through an overview of antenna types, follows with a discussion of signal paths and interference, and continues on with a thorough explanation of dB, the measurement for signal strength and noise.

Unger feels that dB is very complex. The numbers are logarithmic, meaning that each increase of 10 dB is a tenfold increase in noise level. If you've never handled logarithmic numbers before, wrestling with dB can be mind bending (and if you know dB or logs, this part of the course could be boring).

Understanding dB, says Unger, is vital for anyone in the business. "Without an understanding of dB, you cannot do wireless work."

Unger had the simplest booth on ISPCON's show floor. It was just a table with a banker's green light on it. He had visitors almost all the time and did not need a name tag or a logo. "My goal was to invite people to stop by and talk. That's where the learning takes place—talking."

He says he missed going to sessions, but did enjoy having the booth. "I will be free to go to a bunch of sessions at the Wi-Fi Planet Conference & Expo. I'm looking forward to it."

—End

Unger is speaking at the ISP Mini-Forum on day two.