A public-private partnership between the Northeast Kingdom and northern New Hampshire is taking on a 6,000-square-mile broadband project, one of the largest in the country, in the hope of delivering high-speed Internet to the surrounding rural communities.
The estimated $12 million project, known as the Wireless LINC initiative, has just begun a pilot project in New Hampshire that will launch the first step in building a broadband infrastructure throughout Carroll, Grafton and Coos counties in New Hampshire, and Orleans, Essex and Caledonia counties in Vermont.
However, the project may have a little baggage as one of its engineers is currently involved with a contentious investigation of a broadband project in Sandoval County, N.M.
Sandoval County officials expressed regret over their involvement with the contractor, an engineer by the name of Dewayne Hendricks, and are considering litigation and making insurance claims to recover funds unaccounted for.
“It’s just been a mess,” said Sandoval County Commissioner David Bency during a telephone interview from New Mexico on Tuesday. He called Hendricks’ company, the Dandin Group, “incompetent,” and said they “bugged out” on their contract. “I feel sorry for the people of wherever he went to next,” Bency said, “Vermont and New Hampshire, I think.”
Hendricks’ involvement in the Wireless LINC project appears to be limited, though. . He said Wireless LINC has recruited Hendricks for his radio frequency skills to help in laying out the project.
Project Overview
The Wireless LINC initiative is a partnership between NCIC and the Coos Economic Development Corp. (CEDC) in New Hampshire, which came together about two and a half years ago to create a system to deliver high-speed Internet to some of the more remote areas of the region. The six counties being served are, like many rural regions around the world, forgotten by the large commercial broadband service providers.
The project is expected to cost about $12 million, according to Peter Riviere, executive director of CEDC.
Riviere called it an “open access system,” meaning once it is up, all Internet service providers, such as Kingdom Connection, Charter Communications and FairPoint, will be able to latch on to it in order to provide high-speed wireless Internet access to their customers. The plan is for the system to be “symmetrical,” with equal upload and download times.
Because it is largely a nonprofit effort, most of the funding will come through grant money.
“Being a nonprofit, you do things for the purpose of providing a service,” Riviere said. High-speed Internet access is “as necessary as the highway system these days.”
The project is expected to take about four or five years to complete.
A pilot project begun in New Hampshire, covering about six communities – about 400 square miles – is said to cost about $400,000, according to Joyce. He said it was fully covered through a couple of earmarks secured by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and tax credits bought by area businesses.
The pilot project will determine many things to guide the future of the effort – such as how to get around the mountainous topography and thick foliage of New England, both things that can play havoc on wireless systems. The pilot project will also answer how well the equipment stands up against the area’s wide range of temperatures and dozens of other questions.
Tetherless Access
Because the system is wireless, and because the topographical circumstances in New England are so unique, an expert was needed in the field of frequency communication to help design the project.
Hendricks is CEO of Tetherless Access Inc., a Fremont, Calif.-based company, his sixth business.
“My company is like the Impossible Missions Force,” Hendricks joked during a telephone interview earlier this week. “We don’t bid on projects, people come to us because they want us to do an impossible mission.”
Tetherless Access has been working with Wireless LINC for about eight months, Hendricks said. According to Joyce, Hendricks has been paid, to date, about $20,000 or $25,000 for his input.
Hendricks, 57, is one of the top minds in his field, a leader in the area of delivering broadband Internet to the rural, underserved areas of the country, even the world. In fact, one can’t go too far in the wireless industry without bumping into him in some manner or another.
In 2002 Wired Magazine called him the “Broadband Cowboy.” He has mounted transceivers on rooftops in Mongolia, built a broadband network for the island nation of Tonga, installed a network at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota, all to demonstrate the power of wireless technology.
“Hendricks is striking a match to light the way,” Brent Hurtig wrote in Wired. “He’s a professional gadfly … with few qualifications beyond vision, chutzpah, and a hands-on mastery of wireless technology. He prefers to operate beyond the reach of U.S. authorities, but his goal is nothing less than a fundamental reengineering of the national wireless infrastructure.”
Riviere said Hendricks is way out in front of what most people know about wireless.
“He’s coming from an area that’s way, way ahead of us,” Riviere said. “He brings to us a very advanced thinking. He’s bringing us the future.”
In regard to the controversy brewing over Hendricks’ other company, the Dandin Group, in New Mexico, Riviere said, “I don’t know him to be anything other than an upstanding guy.”
New Mexico’s Hot Topic
Not everyone thinks so highly of Hendricks, however.
David Bency, county commissioner for Sandoval County, said Hendricks’ Dandin Group installed about $40,000 worth of used equipment and took from the county $1.2 million to do it, and now the system doesn’t work. He said Hendricks kept sending the county bills, which stated too vaguely what the money was needed for.
“We trusted them too much,” Bency said. “They promised to deliver a project and they failed miserably to do that.”
The Albuquerque Journal, which has covered the project extensively, quoted county manager Debbie Hays as saying, “It is clear to me at this point that [Dandin Group CEO Dewayne Hendricks] has defrauded us.”
The Dandin Group is a wireless consulting and engineering firm that was hired in 2005 to build the network. Hendricks resigned as CEO of the project earlier this May, shortly after the state auditor hired a private investigation firm to look into the project’s records. Dandin Group’s contract expired in June.
Hendricks wouldn’t talk in too much detail about the investigation, but he told the Journal in a recent article that he quit when he discovered about $252,000 in unaccounted-for funds in the project. He said the poor accounting practices by former project head Jonathan Mann were to blame. Hendricks said it made him uneasy and his attorney advised him to resign.
But things were a little bit different for Hendricks in the Sandoval County project in that he was in charge of the engineering and, for a short while after Mann left, the entire project. He said he didn’t think Sandoval County officials handled the project very well prior to his involvement and blames the unaccounted funds and poor record keeping on those who managed the project before him.
Part of the controversy surrounding the project in New Mexico, he said, stemmed from the poor coverage of some of the local media that was out to crucify the project from the get-go.
“The [Albuquerque] Journal has been against the project from the start,” Hendricks said. “It’s been pretty one-sided. I wouldn’t call it good journalism.”
Biased media aside, it doesn’t change the fact that New Mexico State Auditor Hector Balderas said in May that his office has issued two subpoenas to contractors working on the Sandoval Broadband project. One was to Hendricks, the other to the county-owned Sandoval Broadband company, to turn over financial documents relating to the project.
Balderas could not be reached for comment, but he told the Journal the investigation was in its infancy and that they haven’t moved much beyond a fact-finding stage at this point.
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