Morley Winograd, executive director of USC's Center for Telecom Management and chair of the Los Angeles Broadband Executive Panel

Morley Winograd is the Executive Director of the Center for Telecom Management at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He was formerly an executive with AT&T for 18 years and was a senior advisor to former Vice President Al Gore.

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. Winograd and a distinguished group of academics and business people from various segments of the Los Angeles wireless community, including the telecom industry and the Los Angeles city government itself.

In the fourth of a series of interviews to be conducted with these busy, hyper-competent, and practical visionaries, Unwired LA spoke today for twenty minutes with Morley Winograd about the Mayor's Broadband Executive Panel and the task it now must address: unwiring LA.

In that interview, Mr. Winograd talks a bit about his background; how he assembled the membership of the BEP; the various special competencies of these members; how an unwired LA could save the city government money, allowing it to either lower taxes or improve services, or both; and how it would help facilitate more widespread community building.

A question brought up, but not answered, because it is at the core of the work that the BEP still needs to do, was "Will the city decide to offer broadband wireless access as a utility?"

Mr. Winograd said he thought that the mere presence of broadband wireless access ought not to seriously increase health risks to city residents, although it remains to be determined to what extent individual wireless devices might increase health risks to their users.

The interview also included a brief discussion of privacy issues that might be raised by the ability of a ubiquitous wireless network to support ubiquitous video surveillance of the population, an issue that Mr. Winograd indicated would probably be left to others outside the BEP to work out.

There was also some discussion of the recent announcement by SBC that it would be spending $4 billion to expand its optical fiber network throughout its service areas, including Los Angeles.

On the political side, Mr. Winograd indicated that the level of support by the Los Angeles City Council for this broadband initiative was still not clear, but that councilmembers would be looked to for input and that whatever the BEP finally submits as its proposal would be more likely to be approved in direct proportion to how financially advantageous it will be for the strained city budget to implement it.

Finally, Mr. Winograd added to the debate about whether universal ubiquitous untethered broadband might provide a means to do something about the almost-universal ubiquitous gridlock now afflicting the City of Los Angeles when he suggested that such a network might bring with it the ability to convert the "dead time" of individual or mass transportation to "live time" by letting commuters work wirelessly and productively on the way to and from their work places in various forms of public transportation.

While not fulfilling the fantasy solution of some of everyone staying home most of the time and telecommuting through broadband, this suggestion of his might be able to simultaneously provide workers with the essential opportunities they need to interact directly in the same physical space with their colleagues and business associates, while making their working life so much more efficient that they might be able to actually spend more time with their families, as they travel to and from their homes in transportation corridors where the traffic is also somewhat thinned out through the wider use of wirelessly- and fiber optically-enabled broadband connectivity.

You can hear this interview with Morley Winograd by clicking here.