Fixed Wireless Business

The Peoples Hero

Brian Capouch is well known among those who work in VoIP for his originial thinking, and we were glad to nab an interview with him about his latest project.

by Gerry Blackwell [January 8, 2009]

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

That was the warning college professor and back-to-the-land WISP operator Brian Capouch sounded over a year ago in a lecture to students. Not in exactly those words, but close to it.

Capouch talked about collateralized debt, he talked about living on borrowed time, he talked about the country going bankrupt. Colleagues laughed, the students were bewildered.

But now that the sky has indeed fallen, Capouch and his tiny, do-it-yourself WISP, Peoples Internet, in rural Indiana, may be better prepared than many businesses to weather the storms ahead.

Heck, if the power grid collapses, he says, he can even run the thing on batteries.

The first battery-operated WISP would make a great next chapter in the decidedly grass-roots saga of Peoples Internet, and one very much in keeping with the rest of the story. That's if there is a next chapter.

The future of the enterprise hangs in the balance, not because of the economic downturn but because of earlier market shifts, internal problems—not least of them the changing climate—and because Capouch and his partner are growing weary of the hard slog of running a WISP by the seat of their pants.

There is something inspiring about the Peoples story, though. And as Capouch says, if the sky keeps falling, or if the market shifts further in the direction he thinks it might, there could be a very important place for enterprises like his.

Almost anyone could do what he did, he insists. (We're a little skeptical about that.)

The story
Capouch is chair of the department of computer science and an assistant professor at Saint Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana. He lives in "deep country" nearby, amid corn fields and cattle farms.

Six years ago, he couldn't get broadband internet service in his neck of the woods, which for Capouch, who can't really leave his job at the office, was inconvenient to say the least.

He found a not-too-distant ISP that could reach as far as a friendly neighbor's farm, and he put a radio and antenna on the man's silo and another at his house. "It was the most liberating thing in the world because now I had broadband," he recalls.

Capouch didn't stop at bridging his own personal digital divide.

"We built that first link and it looked like a good idea," he says. "So my neighbor and I thought, 'Well, there's got to be other people…' So we decided try our hands at having an ISP."

Just like that. It helps to know a little about the technology, of course. His department at St. Joe's actually teaches courses in setting up ISPs and WISPs, and also in voice over Internet technology (knowledge that would come in handy later).

He and his partner were right about there being pent-up demand. There were other farmers—some of the cattle operations in the area have as many as 7,000 cows, which means they're big, sophisticated businesses—and a smattering of urban professionals looking for a rural retreat but wanting to stay connected.

The Peoples Internet network grew slowly, link by link.

"We found farmers who had vertical space [usually a silo] and traded bandwidth [for access rights]," Capouch explains. "We brought in bandwidth and let them use some of it as their payment. And then we'd put an access point up [on the silo] and try to connect the farmers in the vicinity."

Go to page two: Peoples today >