Stroh Publications LLC Joins WISPA

Posting to WISPA public and WISPA Members lists:

New WISPA Member - Steve Stroh
From: John Scrivner    
To: WISPA, members
10/9/2007, 8:17 pm

It brings me great joy to introduce one of WISPA's newest members. Steve Stroh is much more than a journalist of our industry. He is a pundit, a visionary and a true friend to WISPs. I have been very fortunate to be able to get to know him well enough to call him a friend of mine personally. If ever there was a true litmus test for WISPA to be fully vested and entrenched in the culture of this industry this day surely marks it with this introduction of Steve Stroh as an Associate Member of our association. Welcome Steve!

Here is a bit of information about Steve in his own words:

I started writing about WISPs and what I now call the Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) industry in April, 1997 with a column in Boardwatch Magazine called Wireless Data Developments. The column explored the (then) odd concept of ISPs using wireless instead of dialup, ISDN, or the brand new technology of DSL. In the following years I ended up writing about BWIA for a number of magazines such as Broadband Wireless Business Magazine. The writing looked sufficiently promising that in 2000, I quit my day job as a System Administrator for a large company to write full time. But within a year, the dot-com crash hit, and all the freelance writing jobs evaporated. So I started a newsletter, FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access so I could continue to tell interesting stories about BWIA vendors, technology, and service providers. About the same time I started dabbling in writing a blog, sometimes independently, other times for another company (which was a really disappointing experience). Eventually I started my BWIA News blog, which I've really enjoyed doing. In 2004, my friend Marlon Schafer recommended me as a co-host for a new web-based talk radio show being produced by Jim Sutton called Wireless Tech Radio. Marlon, Jim, and I had a lot of fun with WTR and we kept it going for about year and a half, but eventually the financial and editorial overhead got to be a bit much and Jim had to focus on finding a full-time job.

I'd always done some consulting, and in late 2005 and all of 2006, I landed a couple of long-consulting jobs which prevented me from writing very much about BWIA. While I was doing the consulting work, I saw a new opportunity to write about BWIA in a more powerful way. Blogs had gone mainstream - when they're done right, blogs now filled the role previously occupied by newsletters, and the new revenue model was advertising and sponsorships. Using blogs made it possible to build a much bigger audience, but you had to "open source your content", not try to restrict it only to subscribers. I had always written about the "big picture" of Broadband Wireless Internet Access as I saw it - encompassing what I considered sub-industries of BWIA such as cellular broadband, satellite Internet access, WISPs, metropolitan Wi-Fi networks, WiMAX, etc. But in the last couple of years I realized that that all of these "sub-industries" consider themselves "standalone" industries; WISPs didn't see themselves competing against metropolitan Wi-Fi networks; satellite Internet access didn't see themselves as being in the same business as cellular broadband, etc. So... I had the idea of individual blogs that discussed each "BWIA sub-industry", and a few about specialized topics such as BWIA operating faster than 1 Gbps, a blog dedicated to Clearwire, WiMAX systems for license-exempt spectrum, dedicated coverage of WISPs (http://www.wispnews.net), etc. might all find their own unique audiences.

I laid out this vision to my wife Tina over dinner one night in December 2006. We ended up talking about it late into the night and she agreed to help make my idea a reality by forming Stroh Publications LLC. Tina put her very strong organizational abilities and her background in business and marketing into the company as Business Manager, and my role as Editor / Analyst is to write full time for the portfolio of blogs. Tina's vision for Stroh Publications LLC extended even further than mine and she surprised me by purchasing the assets of Wireless Tech Radio from Jim Sutton, and hiring a very capable producer to help me restart Wireless Tech Radio later this year. We've also restarted publication of the newsletter, renamed FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access and WiMAX, reflecting the profound effect that WiMAX is having on the BWIA industry.

I'm really proud to have watched the WISP industry almost from its inception and having had a minor role in helping it grow with my writing, my presentations at conferences such as ISPCON and WISPCON, co-hosting Wireless Tech Radio, and consulting. I think that the WISP industry's best and most interesting days are in the immediate future, not the past. WISPs finally have much of the technology that they've always needed, and with 3650, 5.4 GHz, and television whitespaces, they'll finally have good... and enough... spectrum to provide services to a large base of new users, especially in rural areas. We're seeing serious investors seeking out and willing to invest in (or purchase outright) well-run WISPs. There's a dramatic shift occurring in the ISP industry with users demanding higher speeds to support video, (legitimate) peer-to-peer distribution, and incredible waves of innovative "Web 2.0" services. That shift is catching the telcos and cable television companies unprepared to make the enormous investments needed to increase the speed of DSL and cable modem networks, and that represents a huge opportunity for Wireless ISPs. While WISPA has some challenges in its path, its founders did the slow, careful, and at times painful work necessary to insure that WISPA could, and would become the organization that the WISP industry needed... and could be proud of.

I'm very proud that Stroh Publications LLC has been accepted as an Associate Member of WISPA, and in the coming years I hope to be able to help WISPA in more direct ways than just being a member.

Tina and I had hoped to meet with many WISPA members at ISPCON Fall 2007 in San Jose, but some lingering medical issues resulted in me being unable to travel during October and November.

Thanks,

Steve