10 years and still growing

Wireless Research Center keeps expanding its vision and scope

“It’s been ten years!” Gerard Hayes said with a wide smile and a bit of awe. Yes indeed, the Wireless Research Center of North Carolina is going into its teen years and if anything picking up speed.

Most 10-year-olds don’t get featured as headline news by The Wall Street Journal, but the Wireless Center did earlier this year, even if the beginning of the first paragraph was condescending: “In a small office across from a dry cleaner in Wake Forest, N.C., a team of engineers is exploring the possibility of using data found in 5G wireless signals to measure a key factor in the early detection of tornadoes.”

The article goes on to explain that the 4G and now the 5G signals which travel from cell towers to your cell phone vary in their path. “The team already has proved that humidity can be measured based on changes in signals that 4G and 5G cell towers emit. Now it wants to further test the technology to show that these same signals can help save lives by helping meteorologists forecast severe weather much sooner than current methods allow.”

And, “These signals don’t travel in straight lines. Their paths are affected by refraction, or the bending of waves, which increases when there is water vapor in the air. The change in the signals caused by refraction can be measured and used to derive humidity. The effect is particularly visible in weather fronts in which dry air mixes with a lot of humid air.”

That is straightforward and clear, but it isn’t as much fun as the way Hayes, the founder and CEO, describes how the Wireless Center came to look at humidity and 5G waves. At a conference, Hayes just happened into a coffee-break conversation with

Mark Weber, a research scientist at that time with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The talk turned to humidity and 5G waves. The question was whether you could measure humidity by changes in those waves.

Hayes came back to Wake Forest and laid out the question. Senior Engineer Mike Barts was intrigued along with others. “We sort of McGyvered the experiment and the engineers loved it,” Hayes said. They lined all the walls, ceiling and floor of a room with plastic and ran a 5G wave through it while they altered the humidity in the room. Yes, the humidity changes the wave, and now they are tracking and documenting those changes. There will be more to come from this experiment.

That experiment was simple compared to the task Hayes has now, coordinating several moving parts to accomplish the North Carolina Digital Workforce Hub on the former DuBois School campus in Wake Forest.

(Why DuBois? Hayes said he and his wife, Elizabeth, a teacher and currently

            chairman of the Public Art Commission, have always had a soft spot for DuBois.

            They came to Wake Forest early enough to attend one of the last Dubois Jazz

            Festivals. The DuBois School High School Alumni Association bought the

            abandoned campus in 1999 and began the festival a few years later,

            bringing faculty members from the North Carolina Central University music

            department to DuBois for free clinics in the morning for student musicians.

            That night the alumni always provided a bounteous meal of pork barbecue

            with all the fixings. A committee had decorated the gymnasium and put candles

            on the tables. Everyone in Wake Forest, black and white, who was someone

            or assumed they were someone paid for their tickets and attended. There

            was music, dancing, cake walks, conversations and hilarity. It was

            Wonderful!

The aim is rather simple: To train under-employed or unemployed adults to use computer and internet technology to become certified computer technologists to fill some of those 7 million technology jobs that were unfilled in 2019 around the U.S. and to act as both a training, job pairing and digital community hub for all who participate in their programs.

The job is large because it would begin breaking the digital divide, which works the same as the economic divide and the color divide: Especially affecting those with low incomes and disproportionately people of color who do not have access to computers  and high-speed internet. The reasons for the divide are many, but training and access to jobs can change that.

The moving parts Hayes is working to align include Governor Roy Cooper’s NC@High Speed (iConnect) plan to equitably eliminate the digital divide and which is now under the new, and the nation’s first, Statewide Office of Digital Equity and Literacy;Wake County’s plan for equitable access to internet; Wake Forest’s agreement to provide some funds for the hub if all the rest of the funding is approved; and the federal government’s American Rescue Plan Act under which those governments have already received some if not half of their allotted funds.

The internet and job training have already been combined and are working in the U.S. Virgin Islands where Matthew Bauer (prior to joining the Wireless Center) used part of a $100 million U.S. federal stimulus grant to provide training for more than a thousand USVI residents.

Hayes said one woman whose resume read “Store clerk, store clerk, store clerk” was certified by the USVI broadband workforce development center as a salesforce administrator and now makes more than $100,000 a year. In Wake Forest, Hayes said, a trainee can get six weeks of intensive and often one-on-one training, be certified and elevate to a job and new career path starting at $50,000 to $60,000.

The hubs Hayes plans also function as job-pairing engines for all participants, creating relationships with employers, locating jobs and matching them with trained technicians while charging the businesses, not the technicians; helping those clients learn how to manage their new income, providing counseling about family dynamics and ultimately providing health care insurance. The trainees can opt in or out of all those benefits as their situations change and there is never a charge for the training up to their first new job.

At the same time Hayes is in conversations with a number of well-known national and international foundations and corporations to develop a digital equity playbook that can be accessed and used by any community and entity to help break the digital logjam and divide in their region.

Meanwhile, the initial reason for the Wireless Center – providing a test place for new wireless inventions with engineering expertise to help those inventions work better or more efficiently – is still going strong with the Satimo chamber in use by clients regularly. In the Wireless Center’s public announcements, you will see an open door covered with foam pyramids. That is the insulation for the chamber that blocks out any other wireless signal.

Hayes said they regularly agree to nondisclosure agreements with some of their 200 or so clients (only about 50 are usually interacting with the center at any time), and that has worked in the center’s interest. “When they see we don’t brag about them, they are happy and they tell others.”

Other parts of this business are RIoT, which has its headquarters in Raleigh, and WRC West is RIoT in Winter Park, Colorado. RIoT stands for the internet of things and its mission is fostering entrepreneurs. Cities and towns like Louisburg in North Carolina are hiring RiOT to help them find ways to encourage entrepreneurship and interconnections as they try to revive their downtowns.

The Advanced Mobility Collective is about building an ecosystem for multi-modal transportation, autonomous vehicles and all the associated systems and devices, including drones, sensors, driverless vehicles and even flying ambulances.

Hayes said they already have the ability to send an ambulance into the air, drop it down at the scene of an accident or in your driveway and send it back to the hospital emergency room – all much faster than on-ground ambulances confined to often busy roads. (The editor kept visualizing boxy ambulances we see today, but they have to be large drones.) The group is also working with advanced 5G concepts, and they work with private groups or businesses to provide economic development.

The talk turned to economic development and return on investment for the town and region. When the Gazette wrote about the Wireless Center 10 years ago there was only one employee, though that changed fast. Now WRC employs 27 people, six of whom have moved to Wake Forest with their families. Additionally, the Wireless Center employs people in Oklahoma, Colorado and Pennsylvania, even reaching to Germany, a truly global organization, all started here in Wake Forest.

The company still is in the same rented space across from a dry cleaner’s shop, but the Wireless Center has rented additional space and now the only other tenant is an office for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The center is collecting rent from 13 other companies who rent offices to have a presence and are incubating their concepts and companies alongside the Wireless Center, creating an exponential economic impact for the region.

Hayes said he does not plan to move the Wireless Center. “Our growth will be within the town,” saying they may have a presence in The Loading Dock when it is complete by renting some office space and in the future Tech Park that will be built on the 200-plus acres the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary owns between Wingate Street and Capital Boulevard and/or between Durham Road and Stadium Drive.

The Wireless Center has had an income of $3.2 million so far this year and last year its income was $2.7 million. “But our expenses were almost as much. We always have had a positive cash flow.”

The Wireless Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It is repaying the Town of Wake Forest for the line of credit — $948,950  borrowed – at $4,750 a month, $57,000 a year. The loan was renegotiated in 2016 to a 2.5 percent interest rate and a 10-year balloon payment with a 20-year amortization. It does not have to repay the $308,000 grant for startup expenses.

The money came to the town from the Industrial Development Commission, which was set up in 1964 by the town to operate as a separate entity that would purchase land and erect a building for Schrader Bros. The IDC raised the money for the purchase and building by selling bonds; there was no town involvement in the sale of the bonds. The town always preferred to take the property tax and not accept the land and building as town property after the bonds were paid off.

In 2006, after the last tenant left the building, the IDC sold the land to Jim Adams for $2.9 million. After paying its lawyers and other expenses, the IDC gave the remaining $2,205,469.75 to the town, which then dissolved the IDC and said the money would go into the new Futures Fund for economic development.

Chief Financial Officer Aileen Staples said the current Futures Fund balance is $1,497,187.48. There has been an internal loan within the town for $500,000 to purchase the former SunTrust building, and it will be repaid by 2025.

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