I’ve been digging into CBRS and Private LTE/5G in depth for about a year and a half. My first foray into the idea of building my own LTE Network was at a Conference at the University of Utah in 2016. A dear friend and mentor, Jason Eyre, opened my eyes to the future technology, that would become a personal obsession, through a presentation about the possibilities of running our own LTE networks. I was blow away that a technology that I used every single day and that seemed out of reach was headed my direction. That day put me on a crash course with CBRS.
For the next four years, I kept my ear to the ground but was an outside observer watching friends start to explore the technology. Then COVID hit on March 13, 2020. I was returning from a family vacation on a flight from Maui when the world as we all knew it changed. My job changed from maintaining the network for a region of school districts to figuring out how to connect students at home to maintain education in a pandemic.
Since 2018, one of my school districts chose Mist for their wireless solution followed by several other of my schools. This was before Juniper brought Mist in house. We had happily been Juniper switching customers for years, and the news of the two joining forces made perfect sense. August 2020 during the height of the pandemic, Mist approached me about joining their Customer Advisory Panel and asked for some ideas that they could improve their focus to reach the educational space. I randomly threw out the idea of focusing on CBRS. This got me a couple meetings with the cofounder of Mist, Bob Friday, a veteran in pioneering the Wifi and CBRS world. He challenged me to push forward with new educational use cases for CBRS and to learn all I could, because CBRS was going to be huge.
CBRS has become a passion ever since. At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember reading an article that someone mentioned some big things could come from a world being stuck at home. All the free time opened plenty of time to think. Eat, sleep, dream, CBRS.
