Oral-History:Leo Wrobel

About Leo Wrobel

Leo Wrobel (Leo Anthony Wrobel, Jr.), IEEE member and pioneer in emergency telecommunications, was born in Niagara Falls, New York, in January 1956. He is the eldest of six children and the family resided in Niagara Falls until relocating to New Hampshire in 1968. After graduating high school, Wrobel served as a telecommunications specialist in the United States Air Force for four years (1975-1979) separating as Sgt. U.S.A.F. While in the service he earned associate degrees in Telecommunications Systems Technology (1977) and Electronic Systems Technology (1978) from Los Angeles City College. In May 1979, he began his civilian technical career at AT&T and shortly thereafter enrolled as a part time student at the University of Texas at Dallas, earning a bachelor’s degree in business and public Policy in 1983.

Wrobel is an inventor and entrepreneur in the telecommunications industry. After leaving AT&T, he was Director, Network Planning and Engineering for Lomas and Nettleton for two years (1984 – 1986). Then he worked at Dallas-based Premiere Network Services, Inc., nearly twenty years, first as Principal Consultant, (May 1986 to October 1997), and then as Chair and CEO October 1997 to July 2005). In 2004, he founded The Leo A. Wrobel Companies. Since 2014, he has been Chair and CEO of FailSafe Communications, Inc. which offers systems designed to improve emergency response, safeguard e-commerce and save lives. He holds United States Patent No. 10,812,663 (granted 20 Oct. 2020) for TeleSentient (TM), a telecommunication technology to deal with the problem of getting through to a 911 center during a major disaster. Currently, he is president and CEO of the Leo A. Wrobel Companies (founded in 2004) which include TelLAWCom Labs, Inc.; FailSafe Communications, Inc.; and the Network and Systems Professionals Association (NaSPA).

In addition, Wrobel has authored or co-authored twelve books and more than 1200 trade articles, and since 1997, he has served as an expert witness in technology disputes and regulatory complaints. He is a member of Independent Telephone Pioneers of America, Southwestern Bell Pioneers, and other professional organizations, and he served on the city council and later as mayor (August 1987- June 1977) of the City of Orvilla, Texas.

About the Interview

LEO WROBEL: An Interview Conducted by T. Scott Atkinson, IEEE History Center, 9 April 2024

Interview #906 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

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Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Leo Wrobel, an oral history conducted in 2024 by T. Scott Atkinson, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

Early life and education

INTERVIEWEE: Leo Wrobel

INTERVIEWER: T. Scott Atkinson

DATE: 9 April 2024

PLACE: Virtual

Atkinson:

Today is August the 9th [2024] at 2:00 p.m. I’m Thomas [0:00:20] Scott Atkinson. I am a member of the IEEE Communications Society History Committee. My focus is on doing oral histories on behalf of the Communications Society, the History Committee so [0:00:40] today we are honored to be interviewing Leo Wrobel [Leo Anthony Wrobel, Jr.]. He is in Dallas, Texas. At this point Leo, if you don’t mind, would you please introduce yourself?

Wrobel:

Yes. Great to be here today, Scott. The honor is mine. [0:01:00] Go ahead, take it away.

Atkinson:

Okay.

Wrobel:

Would you rather I give a background or that kind of introduction or?

Atkinson:

You’re welcome to do that if you’d like.

Wrobel:

Alrighty. My name is Leo Wrobel as Scott said. I’ve been in this business since the mid-1970s, [0:01:20] about forty-five years. Telecommunications and finding new applications for telecommunications is my passion. I’ll turn it back to Scott.

Atkinson:

What we try to do is capture the person and the person’s history and [0:01:40] your upbringing. If you would, please, provide us your year of your birth and your place of birth.

Wrobel:

Sure. I was born in January 1956 in Niagara Falls, New York, [0:02:00] the oldest of six children. The youngest is thirteen years behind me, boys and girls. I lived there until 1968. Moved to New Hampshire where I met my wife [Sharon], my high school sweetheart, [0:02:20] fifty years next year. Since then, my wife and I have had seven children ranging in age from forty-eight down to twenty-six. That’s a little of the personal side of me.

Atkinson:

Where did you start your schooling?

Wrobel:

[0:02:40] As the oldest of six kids, my folks had a career talk with me and they said be a plumber, they make good money. I was the oldest of six kids. In a working family there’s not a lot of money for it. I had a friend of mine come up with the bright idea to go into the Air Force. [0:03:00] We went down and talked to the recruiter, and at that time it was before VCRs, obviously, and I plugged in a film cartridge into a portable projector. At the time I wanted to get a radio license. I’d always been interested in electronics. It came [0:03:20] up with a bunch of people working intensively in electronics and I said, well, I’ll do that. “That” turned out to be distant in early warning systems. Even at age eighteen, I knew they called those things distant for a reason. I said, that’s all that stuff up in Canada. I don’t want to work at the Arctic Circle. I plugged in another [0:03:40] one. There were a lot of people, shirt sleeve environment, blinking lights, looked like they ran the whole world. I said what is this? They said that’s telecommunications systems specialist. I said, well, I’ll do that whatever the heck it is. They said, well, you’ve got to have a real high score for that. [0:04:00] I aced all the tests, so I had no trouble getting in. That’s really how I got started.

The Air Force put me through the equivalent of an associate degree program in about eight months. In fact, we used to have some jokes about that. That if you failed out of the program, you were [0:04:20] either going to be paving runways or they were going to make you an SP, a Security Policeman. Every time we thought we blew a test; we would walk out going like this (waving arm back and forth). They’d say, what are you doing. I’d say, I’m just practicing (waving people through the gate)! But that’s what it took to get a nineteen-year-old hot shot in gear, [0:04:40] concentrating on academics. From there I went to Fuji Air Station in Japan where, just coincidentally, we did everything. We were the gateway hub for everything into Northeast Asia. I don’t want to go too far into [0:05:00] it.

When I got out of the Air Force I changed hats, and I went to work for AT&T the following day. They realized they didn’t have to spend the one-year training program on me that was typical for new people because I went right to work. After that, they just couldn’t hire enough ex-Air Force. It’s a [0:05:20] credit to their training and it’s what gave me my start.

Atkinson:

Who would you say motivated you to pursue this part of the technology, communications?

Wrobel:

I’ve always been interested in [0:05:40] electronics. I had friends even in my teenage years for example, one time we went and bought a, I don’t know, a $6 Radio Shack AM radio transmitter that was supposed to be used on a twelve-inch [0:06:00] antenna to broadcast through your house. We realized that if you connected that to the dial stop on your old rotary telephone that they could pick you up for miles. [Laughing] We set up our own underground radio station. Or we would put together some stereos which in the [0:06:20] 1970s there wasn’t a lot out there as far as high-end sound equipment. We would build that kind of stuff. I always just kind of had an interest in electronics. I would say just the association with friends and whatnot early [0:06:40] on. Later, once I got into the Air Force, I realized it was a pretty good way to make a living and it was something I was interested in. There’s where I landed.

Atkinson:

Did you have family or aunts or uncles or anyone like that that encouraged you to get into this career field? [0:07:00]

Wrobel:

No, not really, not really any family. I come from a blue-collar family. A product of the 1950s and 1960s. so Mom generally stayed at home, and Dad worked for Moore Business Forms. He was in printing and business [0:07:20] forms and that. Other than just an interest early on, the rest of the time I just kind of toughed it out and learned it.

Atkinson:

Tell us a little bit about your early schooling: the schools that you went to and what sort of curricula did you [0:07:40] pursue or take. And tell us a little bit about your early education.

Wrobel:

Sure. I guess I’d have to say it was pretty typical, a very classical kind of education in Niagara Falls. It was like going to school in the 1930s. [0:08:00] [That is until] I got into high school though. They had a line of freshmen lined up and they were trying to help them with some career guidance. There was a guidance counselor there. You could tell he’d talked to 100 kids. He just didn’t want to talk to one more. He looked at my stuff and he [0:08:20] says, oh, you’re Leo. I thought I was in trouble. I said, yes. He says, you scored way above everybody else. Well, what are you taking. I said, general math, wood shop. [Laughing] He says, no, we got to get you out of there. We’ve got to get you into some other classes. I said, nah, all my friends are in those classes. [0:08:40] I’ll do okay. I limped through high school. [Laughing] Not that those weren’t valuable classes because I do a lot of things today with my hands, but I limped through there.

Then in the Air Force school, that was the first time I had to take something seriously and I had to really study because I didn’t want to [0:09:00] be paving runways. I got through that tech school and then when I got to Japan, my first assignment, I had a friend come into the office and he says, we got forty-five semester hours for our [0:09:20] tech school and it’s accredited now in the Air Force. I said, what’s a semester hour? They said, it’s a lot. You even get six semester hours for physical education. Then this guy comes in and he says, I took my CLEP test today. I said, what are you, sick? He goes, no, [0:09:40] you dummy, not a clap test, a CLEP test. He says, you take this test, and you don’t have to take the class in college. I said, what do they have? He goes, they have English, they have Humanities, they have Biological Science and all these things. I said, what does it cost to take them. He said, it’s [0:10:00] free. I said, well, I’ll take all of them. I went in, I took the six CLEP tests which were worth eighteen hours. About a month later, I got a call, the dean wanted to meet me. I thought I was in trouble again. I knew the woman that worked in the education [0:10:20] office. She just laughs, and she says, you’ve got to come in. You’ve got to meet him. Oh, the other part of this: when I took the test they said, hey look, you already have forty-five hours, if you pass all six tests, we’ll requisition your degree. Ha, ha. They just made a joke. I get in to meet the dean and he goes, oh, you’re [0:10:40] Leo, and I said, yes. He says, you passed all six CLEP tests and nobody’s ever done that on this base. Being the twenty-year-old smart aleck I was, I said, so are you going to requisition my degree or what. He starts laughing and says, I guess we are. I got out of the Air Force with [0:11:00] two associate degrees: Electronic Systems Technology and Telecommunications Systems Technology. Then I went right into the university. My first day of any like real college was as a junior. Then they tore me up [0:11:20] because --

Atkinson:

What college was that?

Wrobel:

That was the University of Texas at Dallas, UTD. Very tough school. It was an eye opener because I took a history class in the short summer semester, and I got an A and I said [to myself] [0:11:40] hey, I’m just continuing. I’ll try it again with this microeconomics class and see what happens. [That class] tore me up. Then it continued [through other difficult classes] because I’d never brought a book home in fourteen years of school. You’re not going to get through university that way, [0:12:00] but I did. I got a degree in business and public policy which was good because I did hold elected positions later on. Then I got into graduate school. I didn’t finish the MBA program, but I got through part of it, [0:12:20] particularly places where they taught you effective writing and business communication which really helped a lot later on.

Atkinson:

You were a fulltime student at that university?

Wrobel:

No. No. At the time I was working. It was the early 1980s. [0:12:40] Not only did I have a forty-hour job, but AT&T was forcing overtime because it was Dallas. Things were hopping. I was working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks and then I was going to school part time. It was tough, but it was worth it. [0:13:00]

Atkinson:

I assume at this point in time you were married.

Wrobel:

I was. We had three kids at the time and Sharon, my wife, was in nursing school so… I wish I had half the energy now that I did then as I look back on it and say, wow, but it was all worth it.

Atkinson:

I’m going to [0:13:20] jump in here and say at this point in time, this is when I met Leo in Dallas. I was working for a company called Lomas and Nettleton, I believe, Information Technologies or something like that. I was the Director of Telecommunications [0:13:40] there. The year was 1984, probably in the fall. I was interviewing for a network engineer to fulfill that role in Lomas and Nettleton. I [0:14:00] do remember Leo when we hired him. It was kind of strange. We took him to lunch one day and had a good conversation with him and as a result of that we offered him an opportunity to join us, and he did. [0:14:20] I have known Leo ever since that time. I guess in a way I’m sort of part of this interview for Leo. I encouraged him to perform this oral history for the IEEE on behalf of my knowledge of [0:14:40] him and what he’s accomplished in his career. I did want to sort of throw that in here so from this point forward, it’s kind of like he and I were mutually engaged in various activities, business-wise and [0:15:00] personal-wise so I do consider him a very close personal friend of mine. Let me thank you Leo for all the years we have known each other [Laughing].

Wrobel:

Oh, absolutely Scott. You know what? As long as we’re talking along those [0:15:20] lines, I’m happy to throw in that Scott Atkinson has been a driving force in my life and a mentor. He encouraged me to join IEEE early. Right down to what kind of clothes to wear for success. He’s always been very [0:15:40] knowledgeable, very open-minded [and] just a really good friend. In fact, I’m surprised you remember even the month and the year because I was at the time [when] AT&T was lifetime employment. A lot of people lose track of that. Realize, that I had parents who told me: [0:16:00] be a plumber because there was security in that. You’d always have work. My mother was a telephone operator for New York Telephone when we lived there for a while. It was like that was as far as a lot of people went. Once you got hired at the phone company that was as far as a lot of people went. It was a [0:16:20] lifetime employment.

At the time I was, I don’t know, maybe twenty-eight years old. I finished college. I sent out three resumes. One was for an outside sales job that I knew I was not qualified for. Then two more got back and they said we want to interview you. [0:16:40] One of them was a mutual friend of Scott and mine, Archie Croom, who is, along with Scott, one of the most intelligent people I know on the planet. Scott, it was a leap of [0:17:00] faith. Archie and Scott seemed to be very knowledgeable and straightforward and intelligent people. I remember telling my wife, hey, I’ll go out, it’s a free prime rib [dinner], and let’s see what happens. We all agreed that [0:17:20] evening to come to work. Archie was my boss and Scott was Archie’s boss. Since that time, and I’m sure we’ll get into it, I’ve worked for Scott and Scott has worked for me. I started a phone company. He [0:17:40] started a phone company. All these things that I suppose never would have happened, if a couple of very dear friends hadn’t picked up the slack and encouraged me along. Anyway. Thank you, Scott.

Lomas & Nettleton

Atkinson:

You’re welcome. [0:18:00] I also benefited a lot from the relationship over the years as well. Let’s get back to talking mainly about your role. Maybe talk a little bit about your role as a network engineer at Lomas & Nettleton. [0:18:20]

Wrobel:

Yes. Well, I had a lot of free rein there, and part of that was, again, the people I worked for. In fact, one guy, it wasn’t Scott or Archie, I worked for, he told me one time, we [0:18:40] give you the longest rope of anybody here and you jerk it all the time. I think that characterizes it. One of the projects was [called Remote Mortgage Origination]. I had 350 mortgage servicing companies that all used their systems. It [0:19:00] was all on dedicated circuits; 9.6 kilobit high speed circuits, and 350 locations. At the same time, there was a lot of construction in Dallas, [Texas]. There were four very devastating cable cuts in an eighteen-month period. This is an organization that deals [0:19:20] in finances, that deals with money, so this was just intolerable. That was one of the things. They said we’ve got to do something about these cable cuts. We just can’t be down all day like we have been.

At the same time, I went to have lunch with my old boss from AT&T. I saw [0:19:40] a big building going up right next to the AT&T office. It was a three-story building with a 375-foot microwave tower. I said I don’t know what these people are doing here, but they have the right idea. This is really cool. This is [0:20:00] way before collocation or things that have become common practice today. I went up after lunch and I rang the bell and I said who are you guys? They said we’re Qwest Microwave. Remember the name Qwest, Q-W-E-S-T? It later became a Bell operating company, right?

When I met them, there were fifteen people in a [0:20:20] strip shopping center in Richardson, Texas. They were run by a guy named Harold Erbs. Harold came out of the finance world. He knew who Lomas & Nettleton were. So, again, this was the first time I really got to look at the big picture. [0:20:40] I looked at it and I said we should be able to put up a microwave shop like ARCO did. ARCO was the only one in Dallas, and it put up a microwave shop a couple of years before. I said we should be able to get one of those. It’s pretty hard to dig up air, and that’s the solution to our cable problem. [0:21:00] You’ve got to remember, in the early 1980s, these guys put up a microwave communication network just like MCI did. MCI stands for Microwave Communication Incorporated. They were getting 95 cents ($.95) on the $1 between Dallas and [0:21:20] Houston, and their biggest customer was a company called U.S. Tel, ergo, U.S. Sprint, later ergo, Sprint, all right. Sprint was U.S. Tel, which back in the day, this is at a time a single 64-kilobit circuit between Dallas and [0:21:40] Houston was $3550 a month. They, [Qwest], got 95 percent of that rate because they were the only ones.

Harold had a license to print money. He also had a third floor in this building that was unused. I went [0:22:00] in and I befriended Harold and I said, Harold, look, I’ve been watching these commercials. Your biggest customer, Sprint, is dropping pins on TV. Remember those commercials; it’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop? I said your biggest customer is dropping pins. They’re laying their own glass. What are you going [0:22:20] to do when they go away? He gave me a pretty good answer. I said, am I correct in assuming that you want to get into a more corporate-based market? A backbone network with spurs out to different corporations is a pretty cool thing. We can’t be the only ones that are having [0:22:40] cable cuts. He says, yes, I’ll go along with it. He put up $145,000, and we put in a 2-gigahertz Evontech microwave system between Lomas & Nettleton and this downtown central office which incidentally had 7,000 pair of cable into [0:23:00] the AT&T office, into the main tandem. It was 700 feet away. That took care of a lot of the cable cut problem. I got my name in the company paper and all that.

Shortly after, [0:23:20] I looked into some things further. I said, well, who else has right-of-way? Who else has a right-of-way? Warner Amex Cable in Dallas had just been awarded the first -- We didn’t have cable TV in Dallas until 1985 if you can believe that. In 1985, Warner [0:23:40] Amex Cable was awarded the franchise for Dallas and before the paint was even dry on the franchise, I went down to see them. I said, hey, I’ve been reading about this stuff. We’ve got these big boat anchor 750 kilohertz [Scientific Atlanta] [0:24:00] cable modems and they convert 750 kilohertz of spectrum into a T-1. I have a place downtown. How would you like to get into this kind of business? We’re Lomas & Nettleton. Scott, I still have the original agreement on that. I [0:24:20] just found it the other day. They, [the cable provider], said who are you? Who put the burr in your ear? I said, are you interested or not. They said, yes, we’re interested, but they hadn’t even finished rolling out cable TV yet and I was running T-1. Again, it was the Scientific [0:24:40] Atlanta Broadband. They were huge [Laughing]. They were like this big, but I was the first one in Dallas to run any kind of telephone traffic on the cable TV system. I was the second one to put up a microwave shot. I was the first one for the cable TV [telco project]. [0:25:00]

Then finally, and then I’ll be quiet, we had another problem: the disaster recovery center for Lomas & Nettleton was twenty-eight miles away in Fort Worth, [Texas]. Archie Croom, being the data manager, knew there [0:25:20] was no way that we could order new master legs out to that thing because there was a six-month lead time on circuits. He had to have these circuits. Even when I was at AT&T, there were all these passive master loops out to Lomas’ disaster [0:25:40] recovery center in Fort Worth. They cost a fortune. When you fired them up, they never worked. Every year when they had a test, half of them had been disconnected. It was a kluge, so I went into a gentleman named Matt Jacobs, who was an executive VP at [0:26:00] Lomas, and I said there’s a third floor available in this building downtown where our microwave goes. Wouldn’t it be cool to put a data center in there and make that our data center, and we’ll call it Lomas & Nettleton Recovery Services. We’ll go sell it to other [0:26:20] financial companies. He says, well, everybody is out here on Viceroy Drive, and I said, use that microwave in reverse and you backhaul it right back to where all your people are. There’s 1,100 people out there. They go to work. Everything moves in there, downtown. To me it looks like a [0:26:40] winner and it’s 700 feet from AT&T with cable already in there.

I was thirty at the time. Matt went along with it. I waited about four months. I couldn’t get any motion. The company had other priorities. I went back into Harold, and I’m frustrated. I said, [0:27:00] if I can’t get him to move in another month, I’m going to come back and talk to you. He says, well, why don’t you do it now? I said, well, I am. He says, look, if you’re tired of waiting on them, I’ll back it. I almost fell out of the chair. He lent $1 million [0:27:20] to a thirty-year-old smart aleck with an idea. But again, think about it. He was at the sunset of one business. He saw an opportunity to get into another one.

The best successes I’ve ever had in my life is finding companies like that that have to [0:27:40] do something new and innovative. I’m involved in one right here and now, that I’m sure we’ll eventually talk about. We didn’t make a huge amount of money on that, but from Harold’s perspective, from Qwest’s perspective, they’re like, we have to build it out anyway. [0:28:00] If Wrobel’s idea doesn’t work, we’ll put cages in there and lease it to other carriers. Channel 4 came out and covered it. In fact, you can still find the video of that on one of my websites. [0:28:20] It was a hot, new idea, but it was way ahead of its time. When you’re way ahead of your time, it’s also a great place to starve to death. We didn’t starve to death, but we didn’t make the money that perhaps we would have liked to. But when you think about it now, fast forward ten years, everybody was collocating. [0:28:40] Everybody was running cable modems. Everybody was using wireless technologies like microwave. But if you’re too far ahead, that’s a good place to starve. [Laughing].

Atkinson:

Well, okay. Let’s fast forward here a little bit.

Wrobel:

Yes. [0:29:00]

Consulting, Texas Instruments

Atkinson:

I know that at some point that you moved on from Lomas & Nettleton and entered, I presume, you’d call it the consulting world. Do you want to go there?

Wrobel:

Oh, sure. That was one of the best decades of my life, I guess. [0:29:20] Let’s see. Around in the late 1980s now. There’s a lesson here for anybody watching, too. In the late-1980s, when I was dealing with Qwest, they were throwing off $1 million a month clear on [0:29:40] [an original] $1 million investment, $1 million a month clear. And, $1 million for me to build out a data center was a good idea and was no big deal [for Quest at the time]. Well, Sprint eventually did go away. That was their anchor customer. Harold had personally signed an $83 million loan from GE [0:30:00] Credit Co. When the cash started drying up, you know he had to hustle a little bit. This is just a lesson. There are failures involved, too. It’s not all glory. People fail. [0:30:20] I wouldn’t characterize him as a failure because at the same time he bought a factory in Austin and made all kinds of money, but the bloom was off that rose and you have to know when to get out.

In the late-1980s, I started consulting. I published my first book in 1989. [0:30:40] The way it worked out, I found a really good trifecta. I’ve published twelve books, and about 1,600 trade articles, before I stopped counting. Probably 30,000 people have been through my seminars. [0:31:00] I ran them independently and I ran them for people like BCR and Data Tech Institute and all that. Every so often, you would have somebody in a seminar raise his hand and go, hey, how much would you want to come in and do this. You’ve got to calm them down and say Bob, we’ll talk offline. But this is a paid seminar. [0:31:20] This is not a hustle for business. Or somebody would read a book and they’d say, well, how much would you want to come in and do this, or that. One fed the other. In fact, I brought this today (held up a book). [0:31:40] That’s an IEEE book published in 1999. It’s the MIS LAN Managers Guide to Advanced Telecommunications. This was, I think, my third or fourth or fifth book. Interestingly enough, you can look at it and prove to yourself, [0:32:00] I predicted cloud computing in 1999. That’s kind of cool. We could talk about that later. Between publishing, lecturing, writing articles every month and all that, one fed the other. You get two [0:32:20] kinds of consulting assignments. You get the kind where they pat you on the back and they say great job. You get the other ones where they scream and holler and say you missed the mark and threaten to withhold the check. You don’t want too many of those, the latter ones. You learn to give people what they want. [0:32:40].

Atkinson:

Yes.

Wrobel:

You learn to -- I’m sorry?

Atkinson:

No, I was going to say I wanted to interject here. At what point, did you do the consulting for TI that brought in that special circuit connection?

Wrobel:

Yes, that [0:33:00] came about in 1993. That actually is an interesting story because I really feel like I moved an industry at that time. What they did…? Scott, you’ll recall. They brought in an outfit at Lomas called the DMW Group? Their [DMW’s] whole premise in [0:33:20] life was to borrow management’s watch to tell them what time it was. They’re the only ones that really went out and talked to core businesses about what technology really means, what you really need. I watched their methodology. I like to think I improved on it a little bit. But [0:33:40] basically I’ve done hundreds of disaster recovery plans, for example. The best way to sell a disaster recovery plan is to illustrate the impact on the core business. They’re not interested in buying widgets, they want to know what a minute of downtime costs.

In the case [0:34:00] of TI, it’s interesting. I got a call from a recruiter. He says, you need to go out and talk with TI. And I said, I’m not looking for a job. They said, well, look, we’ve been looking for a year-and-a-half and we can’t find the right candidate. I said, [0:34:20] I’m sorry, but I’m not looking for a job. He says, well, go out and bid it as a consultant. I said, if I bid it as a consultant, you don’t get paid. He says, I don’t care.

My back’s up against the wall. I’ve got to send them somebody. So, I go out there; I meet with this guy named George Chrisman. [0:34:40] He’s sitting at the desk, and he’s got a stack of resumes like this in front of him. He says, we’ve been interviewing for eighteen months, and we haven’t found the right person, and la, la, la. I said, hold it a second George, I’m not looking for a job. If there’s chemistry here, you and I will figure that [0:35:00] out. I told him why I was there. I said the reason I’m telling you this is… I don’t know if you can repeat this, but this is what I told him, I said, George, I just want you to know I have no reason to bullshit you. He softens up, he puts his pen down and [0:35:20] he goes, geeze, now we can talk. I told him a little bit of what we were doing. I told him a little bit of what I had been doing and I put some ideas in his head, and he put some ideas in mine.

We were in there two hours. We come walking out. We’re back-slapping each other. [0:35:40] He’s introducing me to the whole staff. He goes here’s our new guy. Then they came in and they said, well, we have so many dark operations here, would you mind doing it as an employee. I said, look I’m going to South America next month; I have other engagements. As long as I can [0:36:00] do those things, sure. If you want to pay my medical, it’s money out of your pocket. I actually went in as an employee and it was a dream job. They said, if you want a staff, we’ll buy you a staff. If you want to work alone, work alone. [0:36:20] We’re a big company. You’re a small company. Show us how to operate like a small company.

George had enough vision to lay that out as a job description. Then I went to work interviewing. [0:36:40] I went out to the first person, and these were all vice presidents and up. I went to the first person. He was in their manufacturing of laptops. He says, we introduced the 286 laptop, [and] going back a ways here, it was the industry leader. We introduced [0:37:00] a 386 laptop, [and] the whole product line failed. We introduced the 486 laptop [and] we’re the industry leader again. I said, what changed. He says the 386 was ninety days late to market. I said, how does ninety days kill you? [0:37:20] He said, we make all our money when an engineer pays $9,000 for that computer when it first comes out, not when it’s $1,600 in BizMart. Not a lot to understand there. You take a good set of notes.

[I] went to the next person. They said, [0:37:40] we are manipulating 4-gigabit chip diagrams. This is 1993, 4-gigabit chip diagrams. All we have is a fractional T-1, a 385-kilobit fractional T-1, between us and our super [0:38:00] computer in McKinney. I said, so what do you do. They say, we spin it up to tape, we put it on a truck, and we drive it up to McKinney. They crunch it on the supercomputer [and] get our answer. They put it on a truck [and] they send it back. [I] take a set of notes.

Later on, when I went back to these people, we said [0:38:20] what if we had a link that was beefy and powerful enough where instead of putting it on the truck, you said what about this. [click finger] What about this? [click finger] What if I did that? [click finger] Not quite that quick, but for example, a [0:38:40] 4-gigabit chip diagram on a T-1 takes an hour and a half to upload it and an hour and a half back. On an OC-3 SONET connection it takes fifty-two seconds. Each of those fifty-two seconds is a day of cycle time. Now have I lost you yet, Scott? Pretty logical argument, right? [0:39:00]

Atkinson:

Right.

Wrobel:

There were some more of these things. Those are just the two highlights. I put this into an eight-page white paper. That’s it. That was a little too long. I would have liked to have had it in three. I gave it to John White, the President of TI, and he came flying out of his office waving my paper [0:39:20] saying I want this everywhere we can get it. Everybody read it and everybody had a charter: now what do you do?

At the time, I had a relationship with the president of Southwestern Bell. I had been down there. Their figurehead president, not their chairman, but the guy in [0:39:40] Austin. I had visited him several times. I said – again, here’s the theme again, an industry about to change. An industry about to change and I went in, and I met with him. I said, Texas just [0:40:00] passed a law in 1995 where you’re going to have to unbundle services. Now remember the Telecom Act of 1996? Texas passed that law a year ahead. That became the framework for the Telecom Act of 1996. The 1995 law says you’re going to have to [0:40:20] open up to competition. My mind immediately went back. I became Harold Erbs and said I can sell for 95 cents ($.95) on a $1 like Harold did. They’re going to do it again, all right? I said so, in fact Scott, this is one of the things I did for [0:40:40] USAA. That was some of the best paying consulting business I ever did. What it was, was going into the President of Southwestern Bell and saying I can lock in USAA right now for seven years, but you’d better pull out your sharpest [0:41:00] pencil if you want to do this. Otherwise, you can wait until next year when competition comes and you can Use the Force buddy, however it works. That was when Adani could only get an 8 percent discount out of him. They came in with 37.5 percent and they locked it [0:41:20] in for seven years because it was a win/win. But the key again is a business that is facing a major change.

Let’s get back to TI. I went back to this same guy. Chuck Lee was president at GTE at the time and we [0:41:40] made the introductions. Then of course, I was already talking with John White. The president of GTE, who owned half of the ring, we weren’t just building a ring, it was a ring with a mid-span meet. All right? The president of Southwestern Bell, the president of GTE, and the president [0:42:00] of TI’s IT company all get together and they say let’s do this. All right, how do you price it? Then it got interesting.

They were looking at a T-3 ring. That was the biggest thing you could get at that time. I came up with how to price it. I said look guys, you don’t have to dig up [0:42:20] streets, you don’t have to lay new fiber, this is not like cable. You change equipment out on each end, and you blink that laser on and off quicker. They [asked] what are we going to do with the old equipment. I said you’re going to sell it to somebody in South Korea at 70 cents ($.70) on the $1 that’s going to be delighted to have [0:42:40] it because they’re just getting ready for it. Then you’re going to go out and buy new SONET equipment, Synchronous Optical Network Equipment. They said, how much is that equipment? I say, it’s freaking expensive. But you can amortize it over thirty years. This is not like a PC. This is like [0:43:00] building railroad tracks. This is not like what kind of train am I going to run. Right now, we are still running on SONET networks out there. I was right about that. They said, all right. We initially put in an OC-12, 12 [0:43:20] times plus the capacity that TI had and overlaid it with ATM, they didn’t want any latency with IP. It was the first ATM network installed in North Texas. Now how do you price it? Now how do you get it approved [by regulators]? They had three Democratic commissioners [0:43:40] in Austin at the time: Karl Rabago, Sarah Goodfriend and the other guy, the chairman, Bob Gee, Eddie Pope’s old boss. They’re down there. TI made me register as a lobbyist. I got over the [0:44:00] stigma. One by one, I met with the three commissioners and the theme was: largest employer in North Texas, most advanced network ever put in, grandma will not get screwed, and it won’t affect her rates. It will help NAFTA. Remember NAFTA? They were just [0:44:20] starting at the time. Here’s how it will affect NAFTA. It will keep the U.S. ahead. You wave these -- but they make sense, they’re not spin. I knew we were going to have no problem when I left Karl Rabago’s office and the last thing he said was I can’t wait to [0:44:40] see what you come up with for TI! I [knew we’re] not going to have any problem here.

I’m proud to say Southwestern Bell and GTE wrote a custom tariff because you had to have tariffs at the time. It hit the Public Utility Commission and all three [0:45:00] commissioners signed it the day it came in. That’s never happened before, and it’s never happened since. They said go build it. I understand since I left, they’ve upgraded to an OC-48, probably an OC-192 by now because the methodology was there. [0:45:20] You change out the equipment, you turn that laser on and off quicker, you shoot different colors down the fiber. But the key is it’s just an equipment upgrade. It was a whole paradigm change with the advent of fiber optics.

Anyway. I published that in the IEEE book. [0:45:40] That agreement employers make you sign that say anything you invent, anything you do, we own? I’m the only one out of 30,000 TI employees that wouldn’t sign it. Their general counsel, Bart Thomas, wrote me my own [0:46:00] agreement and said if you’re still here in three years, then we’ll do this but, in the meantime, you own everything because otherwise, I told Sharon my wife, I said, well, that was the shortest TI career on record because I’m not signing that thing. Anyway. You pulled my chain. I’m [0:46:20] telling war stories. But I’m real proud of that because I think putting those kinds of tools, giving TI a five-year head start on everybody else, at least five years, did things for our national competitiveness, for our abilities just [0:46:40] on so many different levels.

Atkinson:

Okay.

Wrobel:

Yes.

Atkinson:

At this time, we’ve been almost on here for an hour. [Laughing]

Wrobel:

Easy to do.

Atkinson:

Surprisingly enough.

Wrobel:

[Laughing].

[Short break taken]

Atkinson:

Here we are back from a break. Leo has been talking about his activities with [0:47:00] TI and his accomplishments there. Leo, do you want to pick it up from there? Go into your next ventures?

Wrobel:

Yes. Sure. Well let’s see. This probably takes us up to about 1999. I’m not pushing this book. I’m not even [0:47:20] sure if IEEE is selling it anymore, but it’s probably out there if somebody wanted to look at it. On page forty-four, for example, and I know you probably can’t see that, it has the example of the T-1, the 4-gig chip diagram, the [0:47:40] OC-3, the comparison of how long that takes. Then I’m especially proud, on page 117 I actually talk about cloud computing. Now [while lecturing, I never used a] cloud because in the 1980s and 1990s, if you were [0:48:00] instructing and you drew a cloud in a room full of Bell Labs caliber engineers, you got booed off the stage. I don’t want to see a cloud. Show me what’s going on in there! This is not hocus pocus! You remember. Then I’d always have to stop and say this is just the best way to illustrate [0:48:20] frame relay or the best way that I’m going to show you what’s in there. But I had to calm them down. I didn’t use a cloud here [in the diagram in my book]. But I used a presentation server, a database server, an application server and it was all based on the premise that [0:48:40] fiber optics was going to make telecommunications like Doritos: eat all you want, we’ll make more.

When all you’ve got to do is change equipment to upgrade capacity, I said this is huge. This is huge. Now look at where we are today. That [0:49:00] 155-megabit diagram that I just showed you, that’s just a ho-hum cable modem connection today. People get T-3 speeds on DSL today, if you can find DSL anymore. Basically, what my premise in this book [0:49:20] was it’s back to the future.

At Lomas everything was centralized. Everything was in the glass house. We connected because that was the most efficient way to do it. You had everything secure and in one place and manned by qualified people and all. [0:49:40] Well, then everything went distributed. Well, that empowered a lot of people because the graphic artist could get just the system [that] they needed to do graphic art. They’d say I want a Macintosh. Somebody else that does just head’s down data entry says I’m happy with a 3270 terminal, [0:50:00] but they could get what they wanted. The problem became you’d walk into an office and all you’d see is a big butt hanging out from under the desk and it would be a $300 an hour attorney trying to figure out why his fax card doesn’t work. The distributed processing [0:50:20] managers inherited all of the things that used to be done by qualified IT people. You look at this now and you say now wait a minute though, what if we could give Scott Atkinson a mouse and a color display and a [0:50:40] real small PC and a web browser? I published this before Netscape came out with the first web browser but that’s the other part of it. Right now, neither one of us, Scott, you or me, have a big computer here doing this video conference It all [0:51:00] lives out in the cloud. People are accepting of the cloud. People store files in the cloud. Now you don’t get booed off the stage anymore. But what happened? What changed?

Telecommunications became higher capacity and more accessible, so now all of a sudden, these things become [0:51:20] possible. Where are the brains of it? Well, it’s kind of a hybrid. It’s not really in a big data center somewhere. It’s in lots of data centers, everywhere. They all share because they can, because the capacity is there to do that. In 1999, I said that’s where it was [0:51:40] going to go. It’s twenty-five years, but here we are. That’s why I brought it out. First, it’s a shameless plug for IEEE Computer Society, but you heard it here first. I published it in 1999. All right. The next after doing this, [0:52:00] I suppose to pick it up logically, I had done USAA. I had done TI.

USAA

Atkinson:

Do you want to make any comments about your consulting agreements with USAA?

Wrobel:

Yes, give me an opportunity to [0:52:20] brag a little bit but…

Atkinson:

[Laughing].

Wrobel:

Scott, you introduced me on that one. Yes, that is a great telecommunications story. Scott, I think you were the primary catalyst on this. You said we’re doing the [0:52:40] network vulnerability analysis on a building 1.5 times the size of the Pentagon. Why don’t you bid it? They had EDS and Arthur Andersen and all these other people there. I said what the heck, how can I bid that? [Laughing] I called Bud Bates, [0:53:00] in Phoenix. Bud was the most widely published disaster recovery guy. I’m trying to think of how that worked. I think he had one more book than I did. He’s probably published sixteen or seventeen books and I published twelve [0:53:20] books. He got me my first speaking assignment. I got him his first publishing assignment. We’d been together a lot of years. I called him and I said let’s bid it on that basis. We went in and, I don’t know, Scott, sometimes your memory [0:53:40] may differ from mine, but we got in and there’s a conference room with a lot of very stoic-faced USAA people. It was my turn to get up and I had like twenty minutes and I opened a catalog case. I stood seventeen books up on the end of the conference table. I said, that’s why you want to [0:54:00] hire us because everybody else you talked to today is going to be using our methodology. We’re the best there is. I never got to say that before.

Atkinson:

[Laughing].

Wrobel:

We’re the best there is. Oh, and it felt good to say that and nobody jumped up and said who made you God? Right? [0:54:20] They hired me on the spot or shortly thereafter. That was enough. That was the ultimate of what I described earlier how publishing feeds consulting and lecturing and all. Face it, one of the scariest lecturing assignments I ever [0:54:40] had, I had to go to Morristown, New Jersey to Bell Labs headquarters and tell a group of Bell Labs engineers about emerging broadband. [It was a] five-day course on emerging broadband with people that will boo you right out of the room. But I needed the money [Laughing]. I pulled out [0:55:00] those books and I studied, and I studied, and I studied, and I got in there and I blew it away. What I gave them though is I didn’t debate them on the bits and bytes. I presented the bits and bytes, but then I said now here’s how you convert that to cash. Here is how you find [0:55:20] customers for it. That was the part: as engineers, they were the finest engineers in the country, but they were lacking that part.

For example, I’m drawing up on the board and we’re looking at copper cable. I’m saying the typical copper cable will support [0:55:40] 750 kilohertz of bandwidth. Here’s the type of algorithm, QAM or whatever you’re overlaying on it. Here’s how you can take old modem technology and put it on steroids so then I draw up a DSL line. I said [0:56:00] this is what people are looking at. The Bell Companies have $22 billion worth of copper in the ground. They’re not going to get rid of it tomorrow. We’re going to have a flirtation with DSL for a while. So, I drew it up and I said there’s room in this for a T-1 [0:56:20] and a phone line at the same time. What small business wouldn’t want that? Well then, I look at it on the fly and I said there’s actually room for five, six, eight phone lines and a T-1. What small business wouldn’t want up to eight phone lines and a T-1 on the same copper [0:56:40] pair? I said I’m just -- anybody see anything wrong with this. I’m just kind of intellectualizing.

Then we took a break. These two guys come up. I think they were with Ericsson or Northern or something and they said where did you get that. I thought they were going to challenge me on it. I said, well, take a look. You got [0:57:00] this much spectrum. They said, no, no, you’re right, but where did you get that. I said, I just pulled it out of my ear. They said, we are working on that right now. [Laughing] That’s when you know you’re on the right track.

I would do things like that. [0:57:20] That was the thing that engineers weren’t often exposed to. They’re engineers and are excited about bandwidth for its own sake, but they don’t know anything about using bandwidth to shorten the cycle time on a computer or bring a video into your home. That type of thing. Anyway. Here’s [0:57:40] where I was in 1999 and I would dare say at that time I was as good a technologist as I ever was in my life or since because since then I’ve been in executive jobs. But it changed a little bit because I got to [0:58:00] think of crazy ideas and then I had people that were familiar with my craziness that helped me implement them. That started with a phone company. After I did TI and after I did USAA, I looked and I said, hey, [0:58:20] (I was feeling pretty smug), I said I’m 2 and 0, man, let’s start our own phone company. I went down to Austin, Texas and I visited with the chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission. The introduction was made by a guy named Eddie Pope who is my [0:58:40] general counsel now. Like you, Scott, I’ve known him for forty years. Eddie was chief of staff to the chairman of the Texas PUC.

Now remember, Texas passed a law in 1995 to update telecommunications. That law [0:59:00] became the framework of the 1996 Telecom Act. The interconnection agreements around that law: Eddie Pope was the final editor on those interconnect agreements. Then I went down there. We had just had a change. I guess it was [0:59:20] George Bush had just gotten elected in Texas. The complexion of the commission was changing. Bob Gee, the Democrat, was leaving and a Republican commissioner was coming in. I caught them when they had time to talk. I asked Eddie. Eddie knew what I did at TI and he [0:59:40] knew what I did at USAA. I said, Eddie, why can’t I start my own phone company. Eddie is always very strait-laced as an attorney. He says now that you’ve asked me, he pulled out a copy of an agreement that was this thick. He thumped it down in front of me and said make sure you can do [1:00:00] everything that’s in there. I didn’t even open it. I said I can. [Laughing]. That’s how it got started.

We hired Eddie as the general counsel because he left the commission at the same time. He was the final editor on the T-2-A. He knew it chapter and [1:00:20] verse. Now where I was going with this? At the time, you had a personal computer. You had distributed processing. You could pop the cover off that personal computer in it and you could put a fax card in it. You could put a souped-up video [1:00:40] board in it. You could put a modem in it. But you got to custom tailor that, based on what parts were out there to your specific job. I saw the opportunity to pop the roof off the telephone central office, buy the piece parts, [1:01:00] and build facilities as a designer carrier. I coined that phrase. If Fidelity Investment didn’t want yellow or red, they wanted an off-yellow. We could build off-yellow. That’s where the idea started. The [1:01:20] disconnect was that Southwestern Bell Telephone who was now AT&T, is not your grandpa’s AT&T, and was bent on blocking this any way possible. Their vision of competition was people selling dial tone lines out of gas [1:01:40] stations. Not walking in with SMU, American Airlines, VarTec Telecom, as these were our customers. We were taking them away from Southwestern Bell and they didn’t like that. [Laughing] But by the same token we had an [1:02:00] average -- just to tell you how telecom is priced, we had an overall average gross profit margin of 75 percent on everything we sold. Remember how we priced the TI? We ended up with twelve times the [1:02:20] capacity, 1.8 times the price. This is how high-capacity services are priced. We came in.

Our lowest margin service was SMU. Southern Methodist University was our customer. [1:02:40] Do you know how much money Southwestern Bell paid a year to SMU to lobby them? We took 10,200 phone lines in a weekend and it was the best business I ever had. It was 10,200 lines, [1:03:00] we rendered one bill, we talked to two people. That’s as good as it gets. Because they had a big Northern Telecom switch in there, they had a lot of cranky customers. All we had to do was give them a big pipe and we knew how to get it priced.

They weren’t the first one. The first one was actually [1:03:20] USAA. Remember, they knew me at USAA. A mutual friend of ours, Don Griner; I approached him, and I said, Don how many minutes of outbound 800 calls does USAA make every month. He knew right [1:03:40] off the top of his head. He says two million minutes. This is the Quill Office Supplies, American Airlines, every business has an 800 number. Remember, 800 works in reverse, so the party you call on 800 pays for the call and then every [1:04:00] carrier that touches the call gets paid. I’m like, if we were the one that originated that call, we’d get paid. This is a little different than dial tone out of a gas station. Right? I took it to Don, and I said you need to send those calls to us. [1:04:20] They said what for? I said because we’re going to bill $125,000 in settlement compensation to the other carriers every month and we’ll split it with you. [Laughing] It was legal to do then. Every month we sent Don a [1:04:40] $60,000 check and we put $60,000 in our pocket. That service had a 99 percent gross profit margin because all we had to do was hire an outfit to count the calls and bill them out to the carriers. That was [1:05:00] phenomenal.

The reason our margins were only 50 percent at SMU, George Chrisman, who left TI and went to SMU as their CIO, was smart enough to see what we were doing. He says, I want in on that action, too. We did. [1:05:20] We cut him a check every month. I called Eddie Pope and at the time I referred to him as Eddie “the glass is half empty” Pope because every time I did something he’s like it will never work. I called him and I said, Eddie, we’re a $1 million company, [1:05:40] gross revenues. He says, no, you’re not. I said, we just signed USAA. He said, I’ve got to see the check. Next month I sent him a copy of the check. I said, now you believe me? And, oh, by the way, this month we’re a $2 million company. It grew that quickly.

The other one we did [1:06:00] involved a consultative sales approach. Scott, I know you’ve heard this story, but I guess anybody caring to watch this hasn’t heard it. It’s the best telecom story you’ll ever hear. American Airlines was run at the time by an outfit called [1:06:20] Sabre out of Tulsa. Sabre went with us. Every time we did something, Southwestern Bell fought us, so we wanted to do business with Sabre. They went with us to Austin. They told the commissioners: Bell’s being obstructionist and all that. They introduced me to a guy named [1:06:40] Craig Karr. He was over the southern reservation office at DFW Airport. They said here’s Craig’s problem. We get ice in Dallas. When we get ice, people can’t get to work, and calls don’t get answered. They have [1:07:00] 800 numbers that go into American Airlines. At the time, AT&T, the old AT&T, could get on a terminal and command route those numbers to Raleigh, North Carolina, to another call center and been done in ten minutes. But there was no automated system for all their Southwestern Bell lines. They [1:07:20] had a lot of them. They had 297 metro lines that all pointed to their old 817-267-1151 number, so they’d call Southwestern Bell and say move these lines and they’d disconnect half of them and tee off the customers and it was a mess. Then the next day the [1:07:40] ice is going east, now it’s going to be in Raleigh, they’ve got to do the same thing again. It was a mess. I go out there to meet with this guy.

Anyway, I looked at this thing and I said what can we do about that. Here’s how that worked. We could put in something with [1:08:00] Southwestern Bell called a bona fide request, a BFR. What a BFR was: if there was something in that thick agreement that Eddie crafted that they didn’t have, but it was technologically possible to do, (this is the key), then they had thirty days to do it. [1:08:20] I put in a BFR, and I said I want a port. They said: what a loop port combo? Are you going to sell dial tone? I said, nope, just the port. Just that port in the switch. That’s all I want. They said what are you going to do with it. I said none of your damn business. We’re the phone company here. [1:08:40] So, they put it in Legal for thirty days. They knew we were up to something. They got back and they let us have the port. What they didn’t do is when you read that agreement, when you buy a port, you are entitled to all the vertical features in that switch. What that means is [1:09:00] if you want touch tone, if you want three-way calling, if you want all of the features that come with a dial tone line, you’re entitled to all those features. I took it into my operations VP, and I said I want you to order a [1:09:20] port, 99 call paths on that port which was the maximum capacity of a 5-E or a DMS-10 switch. I want you to put call forwarding on it, and I want you to put remote access to call forwarding on it. Now just remember [1:09:40] *72 to call forward? Well then, they also had remote access to call forwarding, you dialed a ten-digit number, you got another dial tone, you entered a PIN code, *72 and you could forward that line remotely.

You see where I’m going with this. I went out and I talked to Craig. He didn’t want to give me the time of day, so he [1:10:00] said I’m busy and rah, rah, rah, rah, and I told him what I started with. I said you get ice and here’s the problem. He goes tell me something I don’t know. I said how would you like a disaster recovery system where you could forward ninety-nine Southwestern Bell lines ahead of time to Raleigh from the warmth and comfort [1:10:20] of your own living room? He says BS and he didn’t use the initials. I said would you like to see it work right now from that phone? He says, I’d like to see that very much. He picked it up and I told him what to dial and he says it’s asking for a PIN code. [1:10:40] I said, it’s your name, K-A-R-R, four-digit PIN code. He goes, oh, cute. He dials it and gets another dial tone. I said, now tell it where you want it to go. He hangs up the phone and he goes, okay. [Laughing]

Now he gets serious. He’s like all right. He says, how much do you want to do this? I said, we’re not going to charge you [1:11:00] anything. We’re going to cut your phone bill in half and we’re going to do that. He says, I’ll have to let you know.

I got back to the office that afternoon. Sabre called and they said, Craig wants to know how the blanket-blank you do this. I’m thinking how [1:11:20] do I explain it. Again, the consultative sales approach again. I got a picture of a Big Mac from McDonald’s. I said here’s how resale works. A Big Mac costs $1.79 or whatever it was at the [1:11:40] time. We get a 21 percent discount for resale. We can buy that Big Mac for $1.35. We could stand outside Cowboy Stadium and sell Big Macs for $5.00 each. Now we’ve got to call it a Big Leo or something, but they can see it’s a Big Mac. I said the [1:12:00] way we do it is we buy two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese -- remember the jingle?

Atkinson:

Oh, yes.

Wrobel:

I said now we have to learn how to run the grills. We’ve got to learn where to get the meat. We’ve got to learn where to get the buns. But we can build that Big Mac for 40 cents ($.40). [1:12:20] I sent him an email with a picture of the hamburger and that explanation. [Sabre] said you don’t [REALLY] want me to send a hamburger to Craig [do you?] I said send him exactly this thing. [Sabre] sends it to him and a half hour later I get a call, it says the hamburger worked buddy, you’ve got the business. As a six-month-old, upstart CLEC, we landed a major airline for a [1:12:40] customer because a little outside the box thinking. [And the story is finished.]

What was funniest about that is remember I said when you turn on a port you’re entitled to every vertical feature in that port. There’s no monthly charge. The assumption with the regulators is we paid for that [1:13:00] switch. We paid for that port. “We” being Leo, Scott, Sharon, James, Michael, everybody paid for that. They’re not going to charge you for it again, so what are they going to charge you for? They’re going to charge you for the [labor] time it takes a technician to do what you’re asking them to [1:13:20] do. Well, to turn on a port, that’s just an entry on a [keyboard] somewhere. How do you price an entry on a [keyboard]? Well, Eddie wrote the agreement, right? We knew. [The industry agreed that] it was a nickel. They just said anybody enters anything in software, it’s a nickel. If it’s just one [1:13:40] entry, that’s it. No ongoing cost. The honest to God punchline truth to this [story] is we got $3.5 million in business as an upstart CLEC from a major airline and it cost us a nickel. That’s a true story. [1:14:00] The best part about it was every time Craig implemented that system, it took it off the dedicated T-1’s going to MCI, and it put it on our switch services and we billed those at 5.5 cents a minute for as long as the ice lasted. Every morning we got up and if there was ice, we were like [1:14:20] we’re making money again!

Atkinson:

[Chuckling in the background].

AT&T

Wrobel:

Because it was billed to all the other carriers, he never saw it. I guess he saw it in his $800 bill. The problem with all that is that [1:14:40] AT&T was, I don’t know, a $100 billion company. We were an $8 million company. We were taking all of their marque customers. More importantly though, we were establishing a lot of legal precedents. [1:15:00] They were just saying yes, you know Leo is a pain in the neck and, yes, he’s making millions of dollars, but what if some of this gets out to companies that could scale it and make billions of dollars? What if it disrupts our DSL plans? What if it disrupts our wireless plans? [1:15:20]

There were a lot of things that happened in Dallas that I won’t get into here. Face it, folks, this is America. Money talks. We had a very successful time. We learned a lot, but ultimately, we realized that the company would never be what we wanted it to be [1:15:40] as long as we had a hostile subcontractor. We knew the regulatory environment was going to change. We put that to bed, and I went back into consulting. Interesting side note though. Archie Croom who, [1:16:00] again, I consider one of the smartest people on the planet, dug in and he learned where all the bodies were buried. Every time, I don’t want this taken the wrong way, but every time they sabotaged one of our orders, and that had happened, he had access to their system where he could [1:16:20] see everything that was happening. We collected millions of dollars that other carriers didn’t collect for nonperformance because data was falsified. It was a bad situation. [1:16:40] We caught them [AT&T] writing their own audits. Revolving doors with the regulators, things people complain about today. But I am not really here to talk about that part of it.

Anyway, the side note is [1:17:00] when we got done, we put up a website that said does anybody else have AT&T problems. By this time, it was the new and improved AT&T, Southwestern Bell. We ended up, in two years, we had ninety clients. We had people calling us from bankruptcy courts [1:17:20] saying we just don’t believe [AT&T data]. Here’s the data they gave us. We would compare that data with what they filed in Austin [obtained outside the legal system through FOIA requests]. Busted. [AT&T routinely] falsified [data]. Our name got around. We did a lot of data forensic [1:17:40] work from I guess 2004 until about 2014. We went down to Austin one time because they had -- I’m not saying we were like the industry champion, but we were a real thorn in people’s side.

Do you remember when AT&T couldn’t [1:18:00] get into long distance? The [Texas] Commission, and I’m not saying red or blue or Democrat or Republican, but we had an activist Commission under Bob Gee that actually watched this stuff. They did an [1:18:20] audit of AT&T just to see how they were treating their competitors. They failed it miserably. They fined them $4 million, and they said we’re going to come back in a year and we’re going to audit you again. Interesting side note here, one of the things I can do, I’m not a lawyer, [1:18:40] so lawyers depend on discovery, but civilians can file Freedom of Information Act requests. It’s easy. In Texas, it’s called a PIA, a Public Information Act request, so some of the things people don’t think about it if any -- not only the [1:19:00] Texas PUC but any regulatory agency, if they send an email to somebody outside that agency you get that email in a PIA request. A lawyer can’t get it, but Leo could. I did a PIA request and I said I don’t ever remember them paying that $4 million fine. [1:19:20] I did a PIA request. [The Texas Commission] didn’t want to give me the emails [to or from AT&T]. I appealed to the Attorney General as a civilian. The Attorney General [told the Texas Commission they must release the emails. Sure enough, AT&T never paid the fine, right? So.]

Archie and I, we go down to Austin to the open meeting [1:19:40] and this is three or four years later. [Laughing] Again, we don’t have to have courtroom decorum either, look, I’m a former mayor, I can look a commissioner in the eye. I can bang on the table and say this is an outrage. I’m a public official, too. I told the commissioners they’re playing [1:20:00] you for a bunch of rubes. You fined them $4 million; they never even paid it. We got it through an Open Records Act request, and it happened on your watch. Of course, the [AT&T] people stand up and they say, oh, we were just getting ready to do that [Laughing], like four years later. [1:20:20] That goes on.

Then we did some more, and we found out the audit that the Texas commission did that let AT&T into long distance, remember? They couldn’t get in. We pulled emails, because of course we went down there and stirred the pot and we [1:20:40] said you never did that second audit. They didn’t pay you the $4 million and you never did that second audit. We did an Open Records Act request. Nobody had done anything on the audit. You got to wait six months [before filing another]. Then we did a second request. Now everybody’s working on the audit! But there’s emails [1:21:00] going back and forth between AT&T and the commission attorneys. They’re saying we think the audit should take twelve weeks and that AT&T guys says, no, we’ll give you eight weeks. They say we think it should look at these eight things. AT&T says, [1:21:20] no, we’re only going to look at these three things. We have the emails.

Then of course the audit is done. It was signed on a day when the three commissioners weren’t even in town. Really ugly story, but [1:21:40] this is America and there’s political favors. We were way beyond our pay grade on a lot of this. That’s one of the things people need to keep in mind. It’s another thing that I’ll segue back into when we talk about the next thing on the [1:22:00] SS-7 [Signaling System 7] stuff. Anybody that’s watching this right now that thinks any way like I do, somebody bigger than you is going to try and muscle you out of your great idea. You need to have a [1:22:20] backup plan for that. I’m not going to sit and say the courts favor the rich and the powerful, but they do. I’m not going to say the legislatures, or the regulatory agencies favor the rich and the powerful, but they do. This is America. This is just how it is. [1:22:40] I’m not going to change it. You’re not going to change it. But you need to be cognizant of it. Now that we’re getting into another project here, which could become a benchmark for things in the U.S., the first thing we did was patent it. [1:23:00] Several patents. We’re already working the regulatory traps on it. Because we need to be out there telling that story. Anyway. I’m going to shut up for a while and let you talk, Scott [Laughing].

Atkinson:

[Laughing]. Well, I don’t know how I could top that. [1:23:20] You’ve had so much experience and been involved in so many areas it’s hard to top that for the average worker bee out there trying to make a living. I’ve observed you and your accomplishments over the years and I’m [1:23:40] aghast that you’ve been able to do all the things that you have worked on and done which is one of the reasons I recommended you for this history interview because you have the different view of the way things happen and the way the things are as they are. [1:24:00] I can tell you this that on my history committee that I’m on, we have two former Bell Labs people on the committee. I suspect when they review this history, they are going to be a little [1:24:20] surprised as well [with] what you’ve been able to do with their, what I’m going to say, their bag of toys.

Wrobel:

Oh, yes.

Atkinson:

So.

Wrobel:

To that point, Scott, I’m sure there are going to be AT&T people watching this as [1:24:40] well. I’ve got to go out of my way to say that I worked for them for about five-and-a-half years. AT&T has 175,000 employees that are the finest people you’re ever going to meet. They’ve got [1:25:00] about twenty-five employees, and we know who they are, who are the devil incarnate. They have an agenda. They work for a large corporation. That’s just how it is. I’m not maligning [1:25:20] AT&T. We had a couple of account reps when we were going through all this. One of them: they said your account rep is out on medical leave, indefinite medical leave. We found out later it was a [1:25:40] mental leave because she was a good person that was being asked to do things that good people don’t do. She took a mental [leave] rather than engage in that. We had two employees, and this is not conjecture, you can find it, we filed all this at the [1:26:00] FCC and at the Texas PUC. We had two employees turn around and they said we ruined your company. We destroyed your orders. We destroyed evidence. Here’s the five people who told us to do it.

At that point, that’s when we realized [1:26:20] that this is not going to be what we want it to be. I don’t want to sound overly negative or anything on it, but sometimes you’ve got to just face reality. People are never going to agree on foreign policy. [1:26:40] Corporations are always going to act in a self-serving manner when there’s no oversight over them. I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m as independent as you get. There are sometimes [though when oversight is needed for the public good]. I’m a believer in net neutrality. [1:27:00] The FCC has taken that up again and I’m like, okay, but even that could be a two-edged sword. Because the way the arguments go on that is, all right, Scott, do you want your internet slowed down because you’re not using Comcast Video [1:27:20] Conferencing or whatever? Anybody will say no. Then they say, all right, we’ll regulate it again as a Title 2 telecom service which is what the FCC is doing. But in regulating it as a Type 2 telecom service, what if the FCC is captured, [1:27:40] regulatory-wise, like the Texas Commission was [by AT&T]? Now you’re giving away rights and you don’t [even] know it. The jury’s out. We’ll see how that works out. But I’m pretty sure that when they overturned net neutrality under Trump, [1:28:00] I don’t have any trouble with Trump either. Don’t like the guy, but I don’t have any trouble with him. Nobody likes him, right? [Laughing] When they overturned net neutrality, I can’t help but think that that was a favor to the Verizons and AT&Ts [1:28:20] of the world. In the regulatory environment, there’s always more to know and the only people that really know are people in the policy management groups of the carriers, or people that are awfully, awfully well-read and smart. Even then, what do you [1:28:40] do about it? I’m going on now. Let’s get on [with the other topics].

Atkinson:

Yes, yes. I was going to say there’s two more things on my list that I wanted to have you address. One is what you can do with the data that comes off of an SS-7 network.

SS-7 networks

Wrobel:

[1:29:00] Yes. There’s a story behind that as there always is. I did consulting work for an oil company in Fort Worth, [Texas]. The founder of this oil company actually invented self-service gas. That is an [1:29:20] honest to God true story. This guy has founded ninety-three companies over a seventy-year career and like sixty-three of them are still in business and making money. He’s done everything from toxic dump cleanups to [1:29:40] oil [and gas]. He’s just done everything.

I was doing some consulting. I helped broker the sale of a small independent telephone company to this guy. He bought it for his wife. We turned out to have a lot in common. Both of us have seven kids and [1:30:00] both of us have seven spoiled kids. I hit it off pretty well with this guy. We were brainstorming, myself and this gentleman, his name is John Harvison. You could find DynamicProduction.com, it’s all one word; that’s the oil [1:30:20] company. We were looking for things we could do with this independent phone company to make money. One of the things is obviously moving tandem traffic and doing that kind of stuff. But I said, well John, let me share an idea with you [1:30:40] I had when we owned our phone company.

Scott, you’re familiar with it. We had a Taqua Switch. We were the fourth customer that Taqua ever had, and we had a switch. [That switch had] 2 56-kilobit SS-7 links attached to it [for signaling]. We [1:31:00] used that switch for a lot of stuff. After that company was done, I took the idea of the 56-kilobit links that went to that switch. The way SS-7 works, it sends a query [to a distant switch] when you dial a ten-digit number, right? Say I call you in [1:31:20] San Antonio; I dial 210-410-1234. It doesn’t set up a trunk right away to San Antonio. It sends a message called an IAM, an Initial Access Message, to the switch in San Antonio that looks at your [1:31:40] phone. The message [asks whether] Scott’s phone take a call right now and it comes back with a response that says yes, he can. Then, and only then, does it set up the voice portion of the phone of the call.

This dates back forty years ago because think about it for a second. In [1:32:00] 1985, at Lomas, you dial 1-617-225-1234, you’re calling your friend in Boston, and it grabs an access line from Southwestern Bell, their meter starts running. Then it grabs an access line from NYNEX in New York, their meter starts running. [1:32:20] Your friend’s phone in New York is busy. Who made money? NYNEX made money. AT&T or MCI didn’t make money because they can’t start billing until the call connects with me?

At that time, AT&T was the main driver and said enough of this crap. They said [1:32:40] we’re going to build a data network that tells the voice network what to do. Now when you dial that call to Boston, it says, hey, Joe Blow, can you take a call and it comes back and it says, no, he’s on the phone. It gives a busy signal right from Dallas. Never ties up the trunk. [1:33:00] You see the original reason for it. There’s also troubleshooting built into it and different things. But it’s a data network that tells the voice network what to do.

Where we get started on this, and I broached this to John Harvison I said… [1:33:20] I gave this analogy. This guy, on the fly now, [says the following:] if somebody calls a mortgage company and they say [they] want to refinance [their] mortgage, you know that happened, right? I said yes, John, in theory, I would [1:33:40] know that happened. [Next] he says they’re going to get a recording that says please wait for the next available agent. You’ll know when that happened, too, correct? I said, [yes,] in theory I’d know that [as well]. He [then] says when they get tired of waiting for the agent, they hang up. You know that [1:34:00] happened. I said, yes. He turns to Mike Hatfield. Mike Hatfield, by the way, is our chief operating officer here now [Laughing]. We hired him from the oil company. [Havison] says [to Michael], I want you to set up a call center and every time Leo tells you that happened, you call them back and say this is the mortgage company, how can I help you. [1:34:20]

Now he did that in his head in like twenty seconds, right? I’m like, John, [Laughing] I said I’ve got a different purpose in mind. When there’s a funnel cloud outside or a flood or a big car accident and twenty people call 911 and there’s only four [1:34:40] lines in that 911 center, sixteen people are going to get a fast busy and that should never happen. I said there is no one, Democrat, Republican, red, blue, either side of the aisle that is going to say if little Susie’s mother calls [1:35:00] 911 and gets a fast busy that that’s not important. I said so down the road if you want to sell sales leads from Chevy to Ford, which is what he was talking [1:35:20] about, you’re the one with lawyers on speed dial, so be my guest. I said my concern is 911 and what happens when little Susie swallows drain cleaner, and mom can’t get through?

Well, what happens is it sends an SS-7 message to the selective call router which has a [1:35:40] legacy network gateway and other technology there and it says can you take a call, and it says no, I can’t, and they get that back. We can put a probe adjacent to the legacy network gateway that every time that happens, it sends a text or an email to the [1:36:00] 911 center. Text would be cool because 911 centers are implementing text to 911. Every time somebody doesn’t get through, the probe we have that looks at the SS-7 network sends the text to the 911 center saying 210-410-2578 [1:36:20] just tried calling. It’s Scott Atkinson at 1305 Willow Avenue. He’s in trouble, but we don’t know what’s going on. Then they can send a unit. They can call you back. Whatever their policy is, it integrates immediately with all their systems.

My [1:36:40] care about this has always been public safety and 911. As a former mayor, I got called one morning to evacuate a town because a tire dump caught fire. If the wind changed, we would have been evacuating. So, I’ve got a little different perspective on this from that [1:37:00] standpoint. But just the idea that anybody that is having an emergency, if they get a fast busy, somebody needs to know about that.

Over the past year, we’ve developed several ways to do it. We’ve taken on an activist position at the FCC. The FCC called [1:37:20] us, surprisingly, they don’t ever call anybody. The 911 and 988 suicide hotlines are very hot priorities for them right now.

Anyway. This started with the oil company, I explained this to [1:37:40] Mr. Harvison. He pulled out his cellphone. He dials his attorney, his patent attorney, who answers on the second ring. He hands me his phone and says tell this guy what you just told me. I did. It took about a year to get the [1:38:00] patents because [our methodology] looks like so many other things. Our patent got rejected. They said we’ve got another guy; he’s scraping Facebook for the word disaster and the word catastrophe and the word flood and then based on that he’s sending out alerts. It looks like you’re doing the same thing. [1:38:20] We said [it is] not the same thing. Not the same game. Not even the same sport. Not even the same network.

We said we go out on a network that is designed to tell voice calls what to do and we harvest intelligent network data. Not only SS-7 but [1:38:40] Diameter, SIP, all these different things. If you’ve noticed, right now we’re on a SIP call, presumably for this. Or you could pick up your cable modem phone and you’re on a SIP call, but that SIP call can [1:39:00] connect to somebody that is using 5G or 4G or a landline. The red network always needs to be able to talk to the blue network. The common currency to do that, the Dollar, the Euro, whatever you want to call it for telecom is SS-7. [1:39:20] Because SS-7 touches every call there is. That’s how 5G goes to SS-7 and then goes to SIP.

We came to the conclusion very quickly that we could put a network probe designed for network [1:39:40] troubleshooting adjacent to the selective call router. Scott, you may even want to comment on this because as I recall, you set up 911 arrangements with seventeen different 911 entities around Dallas. It’s not just Dallas. [1:40:00] The trunks went to the selective call router and then from the selective call router out to the 911 center. It might be stone knives and bear claws, they might be, at best, they’re on T-1. They might be on old carrier associated signaling trunks, but it doesn’t matter because you’re looking out at the people that are [1:40:20] calling. It picks up that 210-410-2578 called 911 and didn’t get through. It will tell you did it get a busy [signal], were all trunks busy, did they answer and hang up. It gives you a lot of [1:40:40] useful info.

You can’t patent SS-7. But as soon as somebody takes signaling network data, Diameter, 5G, SS-7 that rides the outboard non-facility associated signaling path, and they [1:41:00] knock it up against another database, we own that. What other databases? ANI and ALI database obviously. What about do you have Waze in your car? [When] you set your GPS and it says tire in the road ahead, slow down or car stopped ahead? [Now imagine] if Waze can suddenly [1:41:20] say accident ahead, thirteen callers to 911. Somebody’s going to buy that. Or you’ve got people like Everbridge and Intrado [who] sell disaster recovery as a service. Would they like to know where all the disasters [1:41:40] are in the U.S. in real time? Would the Bayer Aspirin Company like to know everybody in the U.S. that has a headache in real time? I would think yes in both cases.

One of the things that we’re also looking at is something we call Sweeps. [1:42:00] We actually have it in operation but [to understand] what it does is there’s a little quick arithmetic [first]. [There are] 400 million phones, give or take, in North America. When I had my [1:42:20] 2 56-kilobit links to that Taqua switch we used to work on, I [worked up some figures as to] how long would it take to go out to each of those 400 million phones and just say, hey, how are you doing out there and have it come back whether or not it could take a call? It’s only 2 [bytes of data (16 bits)] to send that query, 2 [bytes] back; [1:42:40] 16 [bytes out] 2 bytes of data back, [and some overhead]. I did a little quick arithmetic and with my 56-kilobit link it [would take] about three weeks, so that’s a nonstarter. But then I’m like, well, wait a minute. If I up that to a T-1, now I can do it in [1:43:00] less than a day. If I upped it to a T-3, I can do it in less than an hour. Let’s see if this dog hunts. I ran it by some SS-7 experts that know more about this than I do. They said, Leo, well, number one, shut up. [Number two], run, don’t walk to the patent office with this because, [1:43:20] yes, it will work. We did.

Now what we’re finding is in today’s internet world where you get 200, 600 megabyte connections, and you combine that with the technology say [1:43:40] called SIGTRAN that will operate at those speeds, in theory we could query every number in North America in about three minutes. The reason we call it a sweep is you go out to every number, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be every number, it could be every [1:44:00] wire center. Use some different algorithm there. But basically, you query it: can you take a call, yes or no? Then you populate a heat map with that, kind of like DownDetector.com. Of course, every time there’s an earthquake, all of a sudden, the [1:44:20] whole Los Angeles area is going to turn red because everybody’s picking up their phone and nobody’s getting through. But what’s more important though is if it’s on a heat map somebody like Intrado or Everbridge could say, hey look Tulsa just turned red, we don’t know why, but guess where our sales force is [1:44:40] going tomorrow because those folks up there are in pain right now.

These are the things that we’re developing with that. It’s all based on signaling network technology. Whether we do it with Waze, whether we do it with 911 centers, anything that increases [1:45:00] public safety. Frankly, that’s what kept an oil company interested in us for two years and helped us with the patent. Since then, John is ninety years old now [and his] kids don’t have any interest in it. An opportunity opened up for us and last April, we bought him out of his half of the [1:45:20] patent, so we own the whole thing now. That’s the hot new thing that we’re working on.

Michael Hatfield, who was in the room with us when we came up with the idea, is now our Chief Operating Officer and he’s [further developing] it. I’m the idea guy. [1:45:40] I’m not going to be the guy to whip out the business plan. In fact, the oil company’s board of directors called me out there one day and they said all right: what have you got, what are you and Michael and John doing and I explained it. I think they thought I was going to [1:46:00] ask for money because they said, well, we want to see a business plan. We want to know who you’re going to sell it to and how many you’re going to sell and what it’s going to cost and how long it’s going to take. I said, no, I’m not going to do it. They said what do you mean you’re not going to do it? I said I read a lot of interesting fiction, I don’t write it. [1:46:20] I said this is a concept. This is an idea. Who knows? It might be a $1 billion company, it might be a false start, but I’m not going to sit down and waste my time writing a bunch of conjecture when the whole picture could change. It has a couple of times. Of course, Michael jumped up and says, oh, [1:46:40] I’ll do it. Michael is very good. That’s what he’s doing now.

We see several markets. We see one market is the… I haven’t discussed them yet, but it’s the Pacific Disaster Center. You can look at PDC.org, [1:47:00] (Papa, Delta Charlie, dot org). They have a $50 million federally funded system that tracks disasters worldwide down to street level. It was set up in 1992 after Hurricane Iniki hit Hawaii. Senator Inouye [1:47:20] set it up. They’re the ones I went to China for a few years ago. I’ve consulted for them for years. I brought it up to their executive director and he said there’s only two things that [1:47:40] we don’t monitor. He says we don’t know where the power is out, and we don’t know where the phones are working.

This was four years ago now. I told him smart meters are going to take care of your power problem. That will fix itself. I said as far as the phones, have you ever [1:48:00] considered using signaling network data to see where the phones are working because it doesn’t make any sense for FEMA to send cellphones to Tampa if all the cell towers are down. They need to know that satellite phones are what’s needed. That got them [1:48:20] interested in [our idea].

We sent them some data. They simulated it on [their DisasterAware System in hours]. In fact, we filed all this at the FCC, and I can give you the links to it. One day, Eddie Pope who lives in Oklahoma, [1:48:40] said we’re going to have a bunch of thunderstorms here tonight. He says can you run a sweep and show us all the people calling 911 from the thunderstorms? I said, no, Eddie, we don’t have a probe up there, but I can give you the next best thing. I got one of my [1:49:00] guys, he took the V & H coordinates, the vertical and horizontal map coordinates, for every central officer in Oklahoma. We sent those to PDC, the Pacific Disaster Center. They overlaid it over a thunderstorm map in Oklahoma in real time and they showed every central office that was in [1:49:20] jeopardy because of the storms right down to street level. We sent it to the FCC, and we said we don’t have a probe there and we only had two hours but here’s an example.

It’s pretty compelling stuff when you look at it. [1:49:40] That’s what we’re working on now. There is an outside chance, our homerun, is that the FCC looks at this and says here’s a $50 million federally funded system we’ve already paid for. Here’s some guys that own the patent [1:50:00] on it. Here’s the ability to harvest that data every three minutes from every phone in North America. Send it to them so they can populate a map that goes right down to street level showing the causes of disaster; not only the cause of the disaster but who is responding to it and where they are. [1:50:20] Isn’t that something the government should run? If that’s the case, then I’m permanently retired because everybody involved in this is getting mailbox money.

As long as they pay our royalty, anybody can do this. We’re [1:50:40] talking right now, for example, with independent telephone companies because we’re in a paradigm now where telecom is dominated by large monopolies, really. Other than resale, you have like MVNO’s out there that are [1:51:00] reselling wireless, but it’s a market dominated by the Verizons and the AT&Ts of the world. Suddenly this is something a little phone company can do. They have visibility to this network. They have collocations. They can do anything a big one does. This is the first new [1:51:20] thing in telecom in ten years. Small phone companies can do it. You have people, like I say, like Everbridge and Intrado. They’d like to have that big multicolored map in their network operations center because it [1:51:40] tells them where to send the aspirin salesman because it shows them where all the headaches are. They might pay for it. Waze might pay for it. Wouldn’t it be cool to say: big accident, thirteen 911 calls? To say nothing of the 911 centers in a world where they’re converting to [1:52:00] text to 911 anyway to be able to get a text of all the people that aren’t getting through.

Another thing we’re looking at is I’m hiring a guy to do nothing but go to city council meetings. During those three minutes when they let anybody talk about [1:52:20] anything, we’ll have a script for him and they’ll say are you concerned about the attendant liability not only to the city but to yourselves, Honorable Mayor, City Council, and City Manager with 911 calls that don’t get answered? We will have a report on your desk every morning of [1:52:40] everybody that tried to call and didn’t get through for (we haven’t priced it yet), [$199] a month. They get the report. Then when the big storm hits, the logical question is can we get this in real time? The answer is, yes, you can. [1:53:00] There’s a [$1 per resident] setup fee and 10 cents ($.10) per [month per resident]. Is a life worth a dime to you? [It’s certainly do-able.] The City of Dallas just [funded] their backup 911 center, not their primary, [1:53:20] [to the tune of] $8.8 million. If it’s a small 911 center, they can pony up with the North Texas Council of Governments or whatever, and they can split [the costs]. I think every time somebody needs to get to 911 and [1:53:40] can’t get through that’s worth a dime.

The logical follow-on to that is the FCC looks at it and they say, all right Leo, A) you’ve got a $50 million system that correlates it with why they’re calling. We’ve already paid for that system. [1:54:00] You’re not gouging. It’s just a life is certainly worth a dime. The one-time charge is not out of line. What would you want just to let us run the whole thing? That’s the homerun. There is the possibility that that would happen. I think the [1:54:20] Democrats are going to be more inclined to say we want to run it. The Republicans are going to be more inclined to say let’s let the industry run it, or in the extreme, let’s throw it to AT&T, our buddies. That’s fine, too. They did that [1:54:40] after 911 with the metadata where they’re not listening to calls. They threw $1 billion’s worth of business to AT&T and Verizon saying let’s look at the metadata but we’re not listening to calls. See nobody owned a patent on it then. Now on this, even if they [1:55:00] say, hey Verizon, thanks for the big political contribution, we have a present for you. And I’m being facetious, I realize here. [Our model] still works because we still get a royalty on it. That’s how you have to think. Face it guys, [1:55:20] this is America. We’re a small animal in a world of [big] dinosaurs, but as Eddie Pope put it one time to me, that little mammal can eat the dinosaurs’ eggs. [Laughing]

Atkinson:

[Laughing].

Wrobel:

That’s kind of where we are [1:55:40] right now. In the meantime, you can look at our website. Look at our board. We’re at the pinnacle of our careers. We’re not looking for jobs. We’re doing something that we think will benefit a lot of people. You look at the people we have involved in this right now. They have to [1:56:00] have another reason. We’re not paying them. They’re working for equity. You know what I mean? Because it’s just a very cool, a very, I’m grasping for the [1:56:20] words, socially acceptable, and beneficial thing to do.

Closing remarks

Atkinson:

Well, Leo I think in the two hours that we have been talking, mostly you [have been] talking, and that’s typically the way these [1:56:40] oral histories go.

Wrobel:

It’s typically the way I go. [Laughing]

Atkinson:

[Laughing] My job here is to find out as much as possible about the individual. Let the individual tell us who they are. I think without a doubt that [1:57:00] you’ve been successful in that endeavor today. For that, on behalf of the IEEE Communications Society and their History Committee, I want to thank you for taking this time and giving us a peek into [1:57:20] your background and your accomplishments. Without a doubt in my mind, and of course I’ve known you, I can’t remember, since 1984 we’ve known each other, and we’ve worked with each other, I’ve had the opportunity to observe you. I’ve said this on [1:57:40] many occasions, that you are a true visionary. You look at the environment and you find out the options. [Then] using what’s there you take advantage of that and that makes you a successful businessperson and successful in your [1:58:00] endeavors. Again, I want to say thank you very, very much for taking this time today.

Shortly, the edited transcript version will be forthcoming. I will be back with you to talk about [1:58:20] any edits that you would like to make in the transcript. The video will be archived and put on an IEEE server and maintained. The oral histories, of which I understand over 900 [1:58:40] have been taken by the IEEE, are there for future research into the industry and the people who worked in that industry. I can’t say enough and thank you for sharing [1:59:00] your time and career with us today. I’m going to sign off now. Have you got any last words?

Wrobel:

No, Scott; just that the pleasure has been mine. I mean how often do you get to just sit and talk about yourself and tell war stories. It’s [1:59:20] truly been a pleasure. The only thing I would add is I had a great teacher. You’ve always been a good mentor to me. You’ve always been open-minded, and I would dare say that you’re at the root of a lot of this. You [1:59:40] brought me up when I was young, and I’ll never forget it.

Atkinson:

Well, likewise. I know we will continue our friendship beyond this oral history. If you’re okay, I will go ahead and terminate the recording.