All in the family for bandwidth pioneers
by Chris Wilson

A father-and-son team in Ojai is offering an alternative solution to Ojai's lack of broad bandwidth Internet digital subscriber line service.
They call it WDSL, or wireless digital subscriber link. It's a service of longtime valley Internet service providers, Wayne and Robert Maynard of Ojai.net.
The year-old service offers high speed data transmission with radio waves, antennas and access points currently situated to service the business districts of the valley.
On the slower information lane, Ojai.net has been providing dial-up Internet access to the Ojai Valley for nearly a decade. Their approximately 1,000 modem-using customers pedal onto the information superhighway at no faster than 56k. An ISDN line, or integrated services digital network, offers speeds up to 128 k. But the wireless access offers blazing speeds between 384k and 1.5Mb.
The advantage of the wireless DSL, to businesses, Robert Maynard said, is the speed of the upload. Some phone-line-based DSL services limit the speed with which customers can send information, capping it at, say, 128k, Maynard said. But the digital information that comes and goes through wireless DSL, is only capped by the speed of the service chosen.
At the Ojai Valley News, for example, completed newspaper pages, in digital format, must be sent to the printer near Santa Barbara. One page, with lots of color, can be up to 30 to 40 megabytes in size. On the old ISDN line, it could take from 20 minutes to one hour to send the page to the printer. But with the new wireless service, files fly through in less than a tenth the time.
Sometimes when OVN production manager Ed Brooks was sending large files to the printer in Santa Barbara, there was the potential for system crashes, he says - especially if he was trying to do other work on his computer at the same time.
"By cutting time, it reduces the amount of time we wait for files to be transmitted and allows us to do other work at the same time.
When deadlines are tight and the day is getting late, sitting and waiting for a file to upload is the last thing Brooks wants to do.
One drawback to the wireless service at this point is that the antenna must have a line-of-sight view of one of the access points situated throughout the valley. The Maynards plan to continue their expansion. Wireless DSL will soon be available for customers in Meiners Oaks and the Mira Monte area, Wayne Maynard said.
"Right now we have five access points in Ojai and Oak View," son Robert said.
About 40 customers, primarily businesses, have signed on so far for the service. The first two customers were the city of Ojai and the Ojai Valley Community Hospital.
To get more information about the services provided by Ojai.net, surf to their Web site at Ojai.net, or call the office at 649-5862.

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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