Jerry Dotson

July 1, 1998 Daniel Vance

Remember that curious boy in high school whose shirt pockets were always stuffed with sharpened #2 pencils, who actually enjoyed algebra and physics, and who tore down his mother’s car piece-by-piece just to see how it ran? If you went to Mankato’s Loyola High School in the late ’50s, that kid was Jerry Dotson.

Up until he opted for early retirement in mid-May of this year, Jerry was Director of Technical Education for Seattle-based AT&T Wireless Services. And while he was with AT&T Wireless Services he helped lay the groundwork that could make Mankato the international mecca for wireless education.

The wireless communications industry has grown by leaps and bounds since the advent of cellular telephones. Currently 50,000 technicians and engineers work in the industry and by 2007 another 250,000 will be needed. Against this backdrop, AT&T Wireless Services gave Jerry the assignment of recruiting and training enough technicians and engineers to meet demand.

A few years back while visiting his brother, Denny, president of Mankato-based Dotson Company, Jerry lamented how he couldn’t find any colleges that would help him train wireless engineers and technicians. Denny quickly hitched Jerry up with Mankato State University, South Central Technical College and Valley Industrial Development Corporation, who were already working together on a similar wireless education program with a Finnish cellular company.

One outgrowth of this meeting was the formation of Global Wireless Education Consortium (GWEC), an international group, based in Mankato, of colleges and competing wireless companies who work together to train wireless technicians, engineers and computer scientists. Nineteen U.S. institutions of higher learning and nine wireless companies are members.

While you’re reading Jerry’s answers in the interview following, just remember the innocent excitement of that 16-year-old school kid whose shirt pockets were always stuffed with sharpened #2 pencils, who actually enjoyed algebra and physics, and who tore down his mother’s car just to see how it ran. If you haven’t talked with him since high school, Jerry really hasn’t changed much. His eyes still dance with a boyish glimmer.

CONNECT: Could you define wireless communication? and could you highlight its numerous applications?

DOTSON: Basically, wireless communications gives you a network you can plug into, literally, with no plugs or wires. It works a lot like radio and television. It uses the airwaves to pass information back and forth, whether that’s two people talking on the telephone, two computers talking to each other, or me sending you a picture or a video.

The biggest advantage with wireless is in not being pinned down to a particular location in order to do your work. For example, with a portable computer you can plug a disk into it and make it into a portable computer with a cell phone. Then you can check e-mail. You can be in your car and do work that you used to only be able to do in your office. You can keep in touch. That’s the key thing.

As far as applications, there are a couple that are unique to wireless. One is, with wireless, you can get a sense of being there at the appropriate moment. For instance, my son, Jay, climbed Mt. Rainier a couple of years ago and he called me from its summit on his wireless telephone. Being a parent and being there with your kid while he’s on a mountaintop is not the same as hearing about it afterwards.

Another thing I do is call my mom in Mankato while I’m walking around a certain lake in Seattle with my wife. We’ll take mom on that walk with us. Literally we’ll be walking and talking about what we’re seeing. And about a year ago we were at an Elton John concert. I called my mom, told her I was at an Elton John concert and I held the phone up for her to hear.

These are things we could never have done with the old technology. These are people-to-people things. For a moment my mom was with us at Elton John, for a moment I was with my son on Mt. Rainier, and for a moment my mom was with us while we were walking around the lake. Those are things that people generally don’t associate with wireless. It’s more of the business applications that people think of.

From the data side of communications, one thing that is happening in wireless are that devices are being installed in pop machines. This device has a small four-inch aerial on it next to a wireless data network. It’s connected all the time. The pop machine can now report if it’s out of pop by sending an e-mail. It could also send a message that says ‘someone is shaking me to break in, please send help. More importantly, the home office can monitor sales and inventory. So instead of having to make routine stops to stock up the machine even if it doesn’t need it, you can go when it needs it. Sure you could monitor a pop machine over telephone wires, but you’d have to have a dedicated phone wire for that. That would be very expensive.

CONNECT: It looks to me like there’s going to be a virtual explosion of applications.

DOTSON: That’s quite true. Marshall McLuhan is the one who said new media often emulates the old media at first until they come into their own. A good example of that was radio. The first thing a radio was used for was to read newspapers over the radio. So now you have wireless phones and telephony. Sure it emulates the wire phone now, but as it comes into its own, I think people will realize all the novel applications it has. You will have a continued explosion.

CONNECT: What’s your connection to Mankato?

DOTSON: I was born and raised there. My family is from there. It was a great place to grow up in. I graduated from Loyola High School and went to St. John’s University. I later graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle.

CONNECT: If you were an entrepreneur and searching for ways to ride the coattails of the wireless explosion, what business would you start?

DOTSON: (laughter.) I’m an educator. I’ve been in education all my life. So I would set up an educational business. In fact, through GWEC (Global Wireless Education Consortium, see page 17) and the Mankato Wireless Institute we have effectively done that.

The first challenge with wireless comes from within the academic system. Today you have a situation where things are changing very rapidly. There is great opportunity for education that is connected to the front line of what’s happening. Some of that connectivity will happen through the school systems and through GWEC.

Another challenge with wireless is that about 15 years ago radio frequency courses were crowded out of the schools by the computer sciences. There has been a lack of relevant radio frequency education within the curriculum. So you have two things: you have the pace of technology changing very rapidly and you have the fact that radio frequency hasn’t been part of curriculum for several years.

If you combine the great need in wireless along with the hole in the curriculum, I think that creates a good opportunity for Mankato. There is a real opportunity for Mankato to become the national or even international center for wireless education in the U.S.

CONNECT: What were your responsibilities for AT&T?

DOTSON: AT&T Wireless operates across the entire United States. They have the largest footprint of any cellular company. Virtually anywhere in the United States you can get AT&T service. They have technicians in 75 markets. They are maintaining the system, making sure it is operating at peak capacity and quality. The system is always changing. This requires continual education on the part of the technicians.

It used to be that technology was the answer. It’s still part of the answer. But now the ability to use technology is becoming more and more important. What we find is that technology is relatively easy to innovate, but if you have to implement it within a large system it requires a lot of focus on the human element as well. This provides a great opportunity for education to meet that need. Technicians in the field need to have an understanding behind all this technology. It’s not enough to do the task. You need to know now why the system is behaving the way it is.

CONNECT: What role did you play in bringing Mankato into the wireless tent?

DOTSON: That’s an incredibly interesting story. AT&T purchased the rights to frequencies in about a dozen new markets in what they called their PCS expansion. With that expansion they needed to increase the number of technicians by 50%. As we began to recruit these people we became more and more aware that we would have to do a great deal of training ourselves. So we set up a formal training program for technicians. At the same time, we were looking around at resources in different locations in the country. I talked with AT&T vendors Lucent and Ericsson. (AT&T doesn’t manufacture any equipment, they buy it from vendors.)

All of us recognized there was a tremendous shortfall in the number of people who were trained in radio frequency. In the industry, we started looking for solutions. We talked with a number of major schools. In many cases the experience of talking with those schools was like trying to push a rope. You just can’t push a rope.

So after several months of frustration in trying to get somebody interested in wireless in the academic world, I talked with my brother, Denny, who owns Dotson Company in Mankato. He was very connected with the Mankato community. At that time he was running for MNSCU as a board member. We talked about the interface between the school system, higher education and business. I told him the problem we were having with wireless. He said, “People here in Mankato are working with people in Finland, and they’ve set up a wireless cooperative program.” They had started this initiative with Valley Industrial Development Corporation.

It was the strangest thing in the world to find out that in my own backyard, in Mankato, was somebody who wanted to do this. Here we were in the position of having a great need like this and we found someone who was going to do it anyway. It was exactly what we wanted. Here Mankato was pulling on this rope and we had been trying to push it. The rest is history. We matched up with Richard Rush from Mankato State University and Ken Mills from South Central Technical College. We began looking at ways of utilizing community resources.

We had developed a program within AT&T, an 80-hour, ten-day, very intensive program on technical basics for our field techs. It was to make up for what they weren’t learning in their college programs because of the lack of wireless curricula. We transferred that program here to Mankato and sent between ten and fifteen technicians a month here to work with the local people in the local schools. It worked extremely well. Now that program is ongoing at Mankato Wireless Institute under John Rooks. It has become an industry-wide program, not just with AT&T.

It was really amazing: a coincidence of time and place. It was special to find it right in the community I grew up in and knew well. I got to see mom more often too. (laughter.)

CONNECT: Can you project the growth of wireless?

DOTSON: Everybody is projecting very aggressive growth for wireless. It’s very explosive. The penetration of wireless, as compared to wire line, is substantially higher in some of the Scandinavian countries as opposed to the U.S.. There is plenty of growth opportunity here. In the next ten years we are going to see explosive growth in areas we can’t even imagine today. Wireless is basically a delivery system for information. As people figure out new ways to deliver this information there will be growth.

CONNECT: When you were with AT&T, did you ever compare the current supply of wireless technicians with the projected need, throw up your hands and say ‘How am I going to do this?’

DOTSON: (laughter.) At SCTC we have about 80 students involved in the program. In the four-year program at MSU about 20 or 30 students have expressed interest in wireless. It’s simply a question of having numbers like this at a large number of schools across the country. Yes, it is a critical shortage, but within engineering there is an ebb and flow. Some areas are hot, some are cooling off. Recently, petroleum engineering has taken its knocks.

If you take an engineer, that engineer thinks like an engineer. It’s really easy to convert them to another area. You can take a technician in the petroleum or medical field and make them wireless technicians. Within six months an engineer in another field could be up to speed in wireless. I don’t think the educational infrastructure is quite exploiting that the way they could.

CONNECT: It must be very expensive to convert one of these engineers.

DOTSON: Very expensive. Not too long ago we brought in the technicians we needed in the Personal Communications System (PCS), which was associated with the auctions of new airspace a couple of years ago. PCS is the same thing as cellular, except it is upshifted to a higher frequency. When we brought in those technicians we had to train them nearly full-time for five months.

The cost of the program is significant because you’re paying for the student’s salary during that time, you’re moving them here to there for training, and you’re paying for the learning itself. From AT&T’s standpoint it makes much more sense to come to colleges and universities and ask them to do this job. That’s why GWEC was set up: to help colleges do training in wireless technology.

CONNECT: What in your background prepared you for what you did at AT&T?

DOTSON: (laughter.) I’ve always been interested in science and technology. Of course I grew up in a particularly interesting time: Sputnik was launched midway through my high school career. In high school I took apart my mom’s car and put it back together again. I added a few things to make the engine go faster.

In college I studied physics and mathematics. Then I had the great fortune of spending a couple of years working at Boeing in missile engineering. Then I switched from engineering to technical education and spent twelve years as educational director at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, which is a science museum whose charge was the public understanding of science and technology through educational programs. That was an incredibly good job.

I went back to school for a doctorate in management and spent five years at University of Washington, completing everything but the dissertation because that was in theoretical research. I’m more interested in applications.

From there I set up my own personal computer training business. I ran that for eight years and sold it. After that I accepted an offer from McCaw Cellular, which was later acquired by AT&T. I was their first full-time employee in technical education. I thought, my goodness, here’s an area of explosive technology, explosive growth. It turned out to be an incredible opportunity.

Really, I’ve only had one career, and that’s in science and technology education.

CONNECT: How do you think what is happening with wireless will affect retailers?

DOTSON: If your retailing is information-based, and by that I mean music, books, videos, you’ll find that this information will be sold over the Internet within the next decade. Those products can be downloaded.

I like to collect old typewriters. There aren’t many people who collect old typewriters and yet they are beautiful machines. There is probably a community of three hundred of us in the U.S. who do this. It’s a diffuse community. But through the Internet, it makes us a very real community. Through the Internet, distance is not a factor. The Internet becomes a vehicle for identifying a special community and you can market right to them. The Internet becomes the marketplace.

You’ll also see more self-publishing, where you can identify the community that you are writing for and that community can access your works directly. You’ll eliminate the middleman.

Now in hardgoods in retail, you may be ordering and checking inventory with things like groceries. You may place an order via Internet and have it delivered or you can go and get it.

Today’s laptop is about the size of a hardbound dictionary. What you will soon see is something even smaller: the palmtop. It’s smaller than a paperback book, yet it’s fully functional and will have a color screen. You will carry these palmtops around with you and they’ll be wireless.

On the wireless side of palmtops, you will be able to go on vacation and pick up a book for reading right out on the beach. Simply download it from the web to your palmtop and you have the latest novel. You don’t have to worry about anyone running out of stock. You don’t have to worry about it being out of print. It’s a more efficient marketing system and a more efficient delivery system.

Wireless gives you access to the Internet wherever you are. For example, I’m amazed at one incident that happened to me recently. Just look at the size of a dictionary. Laptop computers today are smaller than most dictionaries. I was on the Web the other night, and I pulled up a dictionary site. On that site you can enter a word and it will look up that word in 232 dictionaries simultaneously. Having the ability, wherever you are, to access 232 dictionaries is phenomenal.

CONNECT: Anything else to add?

DOTSON: Another thing will be a change in screens. In the next ten years I suspect that computer screens will be built right into your glasses. That’s one drawback of computers currently; you have to have a screen that is big enough to see. Your eyeglasses will be organized in such a way that you will literally have the screen projected in front of you, on your glasses.