The All-American

Kevin Travelstead: Good name for a guy who gets around but keeps returning to the ol' homestead. Been selling wireless for 20 years. Now selling deployment services as Black & Veatch's new director of wireless sales. Says frozen capital is beginning to thaw.

I was born five minutes from Wrigley Field (the last time the Cubs opened the season with four out of five from the Cardinals: 1958.) I don't remember it. Grew up mostly in St. Louis, then chased a girl to Kansas City. I moved back and forth about three times.

I started with United Telespectrum, United Telecom's foray into cellular back in '84. At AT&T, I managed sales teams and managed the entire market in Wichita, Kan. Also sold some executive coaching and outplacement services for a while. It was a great avenue for networking. It led me to B&V. Also started First Mile Access with three other guys (in August 2001). We had a business plan to provide Wi-Fi solutions across four states. Unfortunately, we couldn't get investors to talk about anything that had to do with telecom. We were a little early in the Wi-Fi craze.

I'm learning a side of the business here I didn't know. Black & Veatch is an excellent organization for providing a national solution that spans the full scope of site development. We played a significant role at Sprint, building the first thousand or so sites when they launched PCS in '96.

Lots of carriers have thinned out their site development staffs so they have to reach out to others to manage site development projects. They can deal with a large company like ours with a full scope of services or they can try to manage all the sub-entities themselves. The trend is to cut down on the number of companies they do business with. It can be unmanageable.

And wireless will continue to grow, especially on the broadband front. We're out of excuses for not deploying these networks, especially in rural areas where the cost of deploying broadband has been so expensive. Broadband has to get into even small communities any way possible. Wireless carriers are going to have to be more creative in how and where they build sites and work hand-in-hand with the utilities and local governments.

In the end, wireless sites will have to get a lot lower to the ground. One-hundred-foot sites need to be 50-foot. That means more sites and people shifting the paradigm of getting into these Mickey Mouse donnybrooks with cities about putting them up.