Jonathan Brewer

Jonathan began his Internet career working for an ISP in Lawrence, Kansas in 1995. He installed his first 802.11 hotspot in 1998, and has been hooked on wireless ever since.

After moving to New Zealand in 2003, Jonathan founded and built an open access wireless and microwave carrier used by most of the country's telecommunications carriers. He gained experience in radio engineering, telecommunications infrastructure, carrier Ethernet services, and end-to-end performance monitoring while building and managing a contiguous network of 400+ links around the country. He installed New Zealand's first gigabit capacity radio links, in the 23, 60, and 80GHz frequency bands, and helped shape the national policy around use of millimetre wave spectrum for broadband.

Since 2011 Jonathan has been a consulting engineer to a wide range of organisations in New Zealand, and in 2013 he joined NSRC as a trainer and network engineer. His areas of practice include:

• Radio Spectrum: As a radio engineer, he designs, implements, and licenses UHF and Microwave radio systems for telemetry and broadband. He is an active participant in radio spectrum from a regulatory perspective, attending policy workshops and participating in regulatory reviews. Jonathan's research and writing on dynamic spectrum and TV Whitespace was instrumental in opening up New Zealand's television airwaves for use with broadband internet applications. With NSRC he was a lecturer at ICTP's 2014 School on Applications of Open Spectrum and White Spaces Technology.
• Wide Area Networks: Jonathan has helped design, implement, manage, or audit heterogeneous networks for a range of large organisations. He has introduced Linux based open source tools including Nagios, Observium, Smokeping, and Wireshark to the operations teams he has worked with, in some cases helping replace expensive, proprietary tools. With NSRC he teaches these tools at workshops in Asia and the Pacific.
• Internet of Things: Radio engineering, networks, and electronics intersect at the Internet of Things. Jonathan has evaluated and implemented a range of IoT technologies for agriculture and government organisations in New Zealand. In 2014 he worked on a team developing an IoT based water telemetry service. With NSRC and ICTP he participated in a wireless sensor network workshop at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok.
• Internet Research: In addition to research on his main areas of practice, Jonathan has worked on projects covering competition and regulation, infrastructure sharing, demand and network dimensioning, the digital divide, universal access, fixed mobile substitution, sending party pays, and broadband affordability. Many of his research projects have been data driven, pulling public and private data sets into geospatial enabled databases, and visualising the results using online maps. His current area of study is interconnectivity amongst the Pacific Islands, a project partly funded by NSRC.