Rich Grimes, EVP, Wireless Cable Partners, and member, Los Angeles Broadband Executive Panel

Rich Grimes is Executive Vice President and Investment Committee Chair at Wireless Capital Partners, which is based in Santa Monica, California. He was recently appointed by Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn to the newly-formed Los Angeles Broadband Executive Panel (LA BEP), charged with examining "what role broadband technologies can play in accelerating economic development in the city and how Wi-Fi and 'next generation' wireless technologies can be used to retain and attract businesses to Los Angeles"

Establishing the LA BEP, Mayor Hahn said:

"I want Los Angeles to remain at the leading edge of innovation and creativity. We need wireless access to the Internet everywhere in the city—not just in select locations. I believe that Wi-Fi and 'next generation' technologies will help us bridge the digital divide."

Figuring out exactly how to do that will be the volunteer job undertaken by Mr. Grimes and a distinguished group of academics and business people from various segments of the Los Angeles wireless community.

In the first of a series of interviews to be conducted with these busy, hyper-competent, and practical visionaries, Unwired LA spoke today for almost an hour with Rich Grimes about the Mayor's Broadband Executive Panel and the task it now must address: unwiring LA.

You can hear that conversation by clicking here.

Among the topics covered in this interview are: the locating and leasing of cellular, Wi-Fi, and WiMax sites; the relationship between Wi-Fi and WiMax as sources of broadband wireless accessibility; vendor and carrier strategies going forward as the provisioning of the broadband cloud evolves; efforts in other cities, such as New York, Toronto, Portland, Philadelphia, and Chaska, Minnesota, to unwire the locale; the role of cellular and VoIP telephony as data transmission surges to the fore; leveraging capital investments in wireless in a timely manner; the role of the Transportation and Safety Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security generally, in standardizing and accelerating the deployment of wireless broadband; unwiring the enterprise; the death of distance; telecommuting; residual human needs for face-to-face work communities; LA DWP's fiber optic network; experimental broadband wireless roll-outs in Los Angeles by Aiirmesh Networks and Verge Wireless Networks; and the way the value of networks such as these expand as the square of the number of users increases, multiplied by the bandwidth provided by the network,

Speaking for himself only, not the BEP, Mr. Grimes projected that, by using the core DWP fiber optic network, building multiple wireless clusters and then expanding these clusters, it might be possible to have a city-wide broadband wireless Internet system in place by the 2007-2008 timeframe.

You can hear what he said about that by clicking here.

For a short fantasy ride into what now looks like the outer limits of network-facilitated human conviviality, click here.

To listen and watch this reporter, in the guise of a candidate for Mayor of the San Fernando Valley during the Secession Election of 2002, recommend exactly the kind of universal ubiquitous broadband deployment as is now planned for the entire city of Los Angeles, not just the Valley, click here.