The Wake Forest Board of Commissioners and others crowded into a conference room at the Wireless Research Center of North Carolina Tuesday night for their work session, hearing about the center’s progress since it was founded in 2010, then touring the building and returning for a brief meeting focused on the center’s request to change the payback terms for the $975,000 line of credit from the town.
Gerard Hayes, the center’s president, with Larry Steffann, the general manager, said the center had borrowed $948,950 from the line of credit with the last draw on June 3, 2013. They had made 30 payments toward the principal and interest, and the balance is now $94,584. The center has about a month’s worth of reserve funds with the aim of having a three-month reserve.
Their proposal is to continue to repay the line of credit with monthly payments of $4,750 through the end of this year, then in December convert the balance of under $875,000 to a ten-year balloon loan with a 20-year amortization at 2.5 percent. They will continue making $4,750 monthly payments and once their reserve fund is more than three months the excess amount swill be applied to the principal. The principal will be under $475,000 at the end of ten years, and the center will make that balloon payment.
Aileen Staples, the town’s finance director, was asked if she was OK with this proposal, and she said yes. It will be on the town board’s March 15 agenda. Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said she had several questions and asked for all the paperwork when the line of credit from the town’s Futures Fund was created.
The commissioners, mayor and town manager and others then hurried off for the planning board meeting in town hall.
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How to explain an independent nonprofit research center that became operational in 2012 with three employees and is now partnering with or in touch with Google, Lenovo, UNC-CH, UNC-W, ECU, WCU, 3Phoenix, North Carolina Defense Business Association, GE, NC State, Wake County, Verizon – to name a few – and has worked with some of the largest – and the very largest – companies on projects Hayes and Steffann cannot discuss in public. Companies from as far away as Australia send their people here to test equipment “because we can test it and fix it. And if we can’t, we can tell them about companies in RTP that can solve their problems.”
The center’s help is sought not only for its expertise and its equipment but because they help for a fee but want the patents to stay with the companies. “If we did this at a university, it would say ‘we want a piece of the pie.’ “
Their staff now numbers eight with only one of those part-time. They keep expanding into the different bays of the office building where they began and probably will have to move to larger quarters in the foreseeable future. They provide space and/or off-site support for 17 start-up companies, all testing ideas that could become full-blown companies as two of their former start-ups have done.
They are exploding a new world, RIOT of the Raleigh/Regional Internet of Things, where people and companies are finding ways to connect all sorts of things. Steffann said GE has just dropped SAP, a large German software company for a new startup that will help provide wireless connections for all its white goods – refrigerators, freezers, stoves, washers, dryers – and those connections will have to be tested.
The center is testing wearable devices. “Trying to get something to work next to the body is a challenge,” Hayes said, but they have found ways by using full-body phantom people of any and all sizes. “We’re very good at building radios around bodies.”
Those devices will make digital health networks possible so that doctors can examine patients from a distant location and keep treatable patients out of hospitals.
The center is working with first responders as part of their smart city initiative. First responders need to have the ability to test for dangerous gases in fires and other emergency situations, and they need to have reliable communication devices that work across all local networks and boundaries. “We’re poised to help with that. They want 99 percent reliability. When FirstNet – the proposed communications network – is ready we want to make sure those devices are tested here.”
The center is very much a part of the community, hosting youth leadership – “I’m blown away at what people can do in our town,” Hayes said – providing rooms for the Trentini scholarship interviews, and reaching out to schools and groups across the state. Montgomery County, for instance, has wi-fi in its schools but students use only a small part of the fiber available. The county wants to provide wi-fi across all its territory using that unused fiber. And there are the bus drivers who are much happier because the center helped provide a wi-fi “roof” that allows students to do their homework on their computers and tablets while they ride to and from school.
It is billed as a nonprofit public asset, and it is becoming that for the town. Town Manager Kip Padgett said he often receives inquiries from companies who want to come to Wake Forest asking about the wireless center.
If you want to learn more about the wireless center and its work, you might want to attend RIOT IX from 6 to 9 p.m. on March 22 at the Raleigh Convention Center. Its title is If I Had Ten Million to Invest in IOT, Where Would I Invest? To learn more and to find out how to attend, send an email to larry.steffann@wirelesscenter-nc.org.
