The Believer

Carlton O'Neal: Telco-bred evangelist of fixed wireless. Learned it at TI, took a start-up turn at Ensemble. Witnessed the collapse but didn't lose the conviction. Now VP of marketing at Alvarion, keeping the fixed wireless faith.

I got into telecom because I wanted to become part of the revolution in connectivity. I wanted to learn it from the guys who invented it, so I went to work at the telephone company, but with the desire to ultimately move into a new technology area.

I went to college in the Midwest and I wanted to go back to Texas, where I was from, so I went to work for Southwestern Bell. In the six years I was there, I was in a manager program that moved me to all different areas of the company. I also got my MBA and almost finished my law degree. I was preparing myself to be part of some kind of enabling technology force.

I was convinced that fixed wireless was the way to solve the phone companies' monopoly. I really wanted to be part of a small company and help grow it. But being from Texas, I knew that new things popped out of Texas Instruments, so I went there in 1995 and learned everything I could about fixed wireless.

The original idea was that fixed wireless would give the phone companies a way to do video. My vision was that new companies would use it to offer voice and data. After an exhaustive search I found Ensemble in 1998. They knew the first thing they needed to do was hire a marketing person who knew the market. So I moved to San Diego and broke a six-generation family tradition of living and raising a family in Texas.

Cost and other new technology challenges ended up not giving enough gas to pull fixed wireless through the trouble spot all technologies have in moving from the lab to widespread deployment. We grew Ensemble to more than 250 people and were on the verge of going public when the CLEC market collapsed. As that industry died, a lot of small companies caught pneumonia.

I decided the dream of fixed wireless connecting people in a way no other technology could was still alive. Knowing I wanted to stay in this market, I decided to go to the leader and help grow it. A down market creates an engine of growth for bigger companies like Alvarion to consolidate the market and get stronger.

It's still a very new idea to a lot of people that fixed wireless can be successful. I took the challenge eight years ago to introduce fixed wireless, and now I'm taking the challenge to reintroduce it and show people that we were right.