2003 InfoWorld Innovator: Skip Crilly

While the high-tech industry continues its journey through the slow-growth doldrums, Wi-Fi remains a hotbed of activity and innovation. One of the leading innovators is Skip Crilly, CTO and co-founder of a company called Vivato. Two products — the Vivato 2.4GHz Indoor Wi-Fi Switch and its complementary unit the Vivato 2.4GHz Outdoor Wi-Fi Switch — represent a breakthrough that expands the limited range of WLANs from between 150 feet and 300 feet to an average of 1,000 feet indoors and more than half a mile outdoors.

Both are the invention of Crilly, a Hewlett-Packard lifer, who was inspired to leverage his intimate knowledge of Federal Communications Commission regulations with his expertise in wireless technology. “I had the idea to use advanced technologies and the FCC regulations that allow individual packets to be transmitted to individual clients at a higher power level than allowed by the FCC for point-to-multipoint transmissions,” he explains.

That was the concept, but it wasn’t trivial to push more power through the antenna. So he created a technology he calls PacketSteering, which uses a high-gain antenna to focus the energy as a narrow beam at a more precise location. PacketSteering can also determine the correct direction the beam is to be transmitted and steer it to the client. But sending individual packets to single clients obviously wasn’t good enough. So using a phased-array antenna, the Vivato switches can send multiple individual packets simultaneously. “We call it multiple point-to-point technology,” Crilly says.

The concept was almost ready to roll, but it took Ken Biba, another Vivato co-founder and CEO, to point Crilly in the right direction. Crilly wanted to use a licensed portion of the spectrum for his invention, but it was Biba who realized that IEEE 802.11b, on the unlicensed 2.4Ghz spectrum, was where the technology would find its largest audience.

The key benefits to Vivato’s products are that it increases the coverage area and brings online areas that were previously too difficult to cover. The Vivato Outdoor Switch, for example, can shine its beam from outside a building to either the entire interior or half the interior of the building. In other words, no access points are needed within the building for every user to have wireless access to the corporate network. Fewer access points also means fewer wiring issues and having a single point of management from a central location.

In the beginning, Crilly wasn’t satisfied with his understanding of the FCC regulations, so he queried the FCC, asking if he were to steer packets to individuals, would he need to use the FCC point-to-multipoint rules or point-to-point rules. “When the answer came back that the point-to-point rules apply, I thought, ‘Wow!’ ” he says.

Crilly then matched PacketSteering with phased-array antenna technology for directing packets using a multiple point-to-point model, and Vivator was officially launched.

(For profiles of the other nine 2003 InfoWorld Innovators, see Honoring the Innovators.)