MetroSIG
Events
Municipal Wireless Market
Reality and More Business Models
Feb 23rd,
2006
Speakers
Thursday
February 23rd 2006
Registration
and Buffet: 6:00 PM, Program: 7:00 PM
Law
offices of Pillsbury Winthrop LLP, 2475
Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA
Speakers' Biographies
Craig Reid, VP Business Development, BelAir
Networks
Craig Reid is one of the pioneers in the creation
of a commercial market for meshing networking technology.
He is a co-founder of a mobile mesh company called
PacketHop which is a spin-out of SRI and developed
ground breaking software for distributed networks,
network management and applications. Prior
to PacketHop, Craig was in charge of wireless venture
investments for T-Mobile in the US. Craig has an
MBA from INSEAD, a BA from University of Virginia,
and a BS in EE from New Jersey Institute of Technology.
BelAir Networks provides scalable Wide-Area Wi-Fi
for data, voice and video services. BelAir offers
the industry's fastest network deployment, highest
capacity and lowest cost network options
Nandu Desai, AVP Product Management & Marketing, Pronto
Networks
In his role at Pronto, Nandu Desai is responsible
for defining and maintaining Pronto's product line,
strategic partnerships and marketing channels. Working
closely with sales channels and engineering groups,
Nandu works with customers and partners to determine
specific requirements in the areas of WLAN service
management delivery platforms. He brings 18+ years
of both business and technical experience to his
role.
Previously, Nandu was AVP Business Development for Syndesis, responsible for
developing and maintaining Syndesis' strategic partnerships with telecom equipment
manufacturers and other Operational Support System vendors. Earlier in his
career, Nandu was Director, Market Development for Yurie Systems (acquired
by Lucent in 1998), and held several positions in software development and
product management for data networking and narrowband systems at Alcatel and
NEC America in Dallas.
Nandu holds an MBA from Southern Methodist University,
an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University
of Texas, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from
Baroda, India.
Pronto Networks provides carrier-class Operations Support Systems (OSS) that
enables network operators to deploy and manage large public hot spot networks.
The company's software handles provisioning, configuration, authentication,
access control, security, pre-paid and post-paid billing, and roaming settlement
for large public WLAN networks, in addition to remotely managing and updating
multi-vendor hardware and Wi-Fi switches.
Pronto Networks is funded by BV Capital, Draper
Fisher Jurvetson and the Intel Communications Fund.
In 2003, Pronto Networks received several awards
including Wired Magazine's Top 25 Wi-Fi Companies
to Watch, the AlwaysOn list of Top 100 Private Companies,
and Computerworld's Innovative Technology Awards.
Pronto has its headquarters in Pleasanton, CA and
offices in Bangalore, India and London, UK.;
Carlos Rios, Founder and CEO, nextWLAN
Carlos Rios has been engineering
wireless communication since it was called
digital microwave radio in the late 1970s.
As a radio engineer Mr. Rios developed military
digital communications links, commercial
satellite data terminals, the earliest cable
modems and the first spread spectrum cordless
telephone chipsets all direct forebears
of todays municipal wireless technology.
More direct to the WiFi point,
in 1998 Mr. Rios established 3Coms Wireless
LAN development group and in 2001, as a
long time industry standards-body contributor,
proposed what ultimately became IEEE 802.11g.
In 2003 Mr. Rios founded nextWLAN
Corporation in the belief that groundbreaking
WiFi product design could very well survive
the demise of the US wireless networking
giants, and perhaps MicroNodes will prove
him prescient.
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