The Thinker

I started my career at Bell Labs in the semiconductor business. When that became part of Lucent Technologies, I had the good fortune to be able to switch to Lucent's wireless division when the wireless industry was growing like crazy. In my group at Lucent, we were developing technology related to 3G standards. It was back then that I started having thoughts about personal broadband — the idea that you could always have broadband with you and it would always be on.

Later, when I was at Arraycomm, I developed a personal broadband system. I was at Arraycomm for three years, and left last spring. I met the people from RHK, and the first thing I thought was, no, I'm not an analyst in the traditional sense. I was offered jobs. I could have been CEO of this or that. But some people decide to take different paths in life, to focus more broadly on the industry, than on developing products for just one company. I looked closer and saw that RHK was addressing a wide range of thorny industry problems, so I founded the wireless research and consulting group at RHK.

I have a theory about the future of wireless I like to call “No. 47.” You have 802.11, 802.16 and 802.20 — and 11, 16 and 20 add up to 47. These are the key things shaping the industry. 802.20 is about a nomadic and portable personal system, and together with the other standards you get the benefits of real personal broadband.

The way I work is to try and develop multifaceted scenarios in my mind. This is how I have always worked, going back to my days at Lucent. I try not to be linear, but think kind of sideways and develop all the different possible scenarios and how they might turn out and interact. I try to look at the whole landscape very clearly in my mind, and in this way I get a time horizon that is longer and wider than it would be just thinking about one thing in its own timeline — so I can figure out how it will develop in respect to history and other things happening at the same time. Maybe that way of thinking throughout my career has all been preparation to become an analyst.