Keynote Speech: Victor Bahl - Volume 2

We began our journey with the goal of commoditizing pervasive connectivity for the remaining billions. We gravitated towards providing neighborhood connectivity in developing and rural regions. Businesses saw an opportunity and local government began to value blanket city-wide coverage. But success was not inevitable. Deployments failed and critics questioned the promises. Perhaps the technology was not ready for prime time. So we began "fixing" the technology, part of which included revisiting governmental policies around spectrum allocation. The US government listened and in a landmark ruling on Nov. 4, the FCC voted to open the unused low frequency bands for unlicensed use. In this talk, the author discussed the evolution of our thinking on how to achieve open pervasive Internet connectivity. The author highlight promising new directions that are full of interesting challenges. The author discussed solutions that researchers are developing and show their trajectory. The author's objective is to present what the author believe is the new frontier of wireless networking and ubiquitous Internet, at the intersection of cognitive systems, mesh networking, and white spaces. The author challenged the audience into taking on new technical problems and thinking about new business models, which will lead us to success in our original goal of commoditizing pervasive connectivity for the masses, bridging the digital divide, and enabling exciting new applications and services in the process.