Executive Bios

Jim Raab - Principal Consultant

Jim has been involved in wireless and networking standards and applications for over 15 years. In 2003 he founded OakTree Wireless as an answer to the wireless networking industry’s call for pinpoint technology expertise. He has had previous experience at Wayport, Tivoli Systems, Lincom Wireless, and Musenki. After completing his Masters from Utah State University, he worked out of Laramie, Wyoming managing technology accounts for a custom business systems consultancy. His accounts included Motorola, AOL, Intuit, and others. The four years between his Masters and his undergraduate from Colorado State University, Jim worked in the Virgin Islands with the Rockresorts Corporation in program development for a chain of luxury resorts like Caneel Bay and Little Dix Bay. The first applications of wireless to span communications in a remote island environment influenced him in his graduate program choices and career path to understand the networking and wireless industry.

Jim lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two daughters. When he is not talking with regulators, scanning the technology horizon or guiding companies on a winning product development path, he enjoys boating, fishing, ranching and the live music scene.

Katie Moran - Executive Consultant

Katie joined OakTree Wireless Consulting as an Associate Consultant in November 2003, bringing 8 years of experience to the company. Following her graduation from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Katie returned to her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee where she joined the Human Resources department of Baptist Health Systems. After two years and a big need for change, Katie picked up and moved to Austin, Texas where she joined Tivoli Software/IBM. For four years, she worked with the IBM Software Executive Briefing Center in meeting/event management handling worldwide sales, customer, and partner based meetings and events.

Katie lives in Austin, Texas. In her free time, she runs a jewelry and sewn goods business, Stars n' Rockets, enjoys reading, traveling, and spending quality time with her boyfriend, friends and family.

Associate Consultants

Phil Belanger

Phil is a pioneer in the wireless industry and has been instrumental in creating and promoting the 802.11 standard for wireless LANs. He was active in the IEEE 802.11 committee during the development of the original Medium Access Control and Physical layer standards. Phil is a co-author of the DFWMAC protocol, which was selected as the foundation for the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol standard and is still used with Wi-Fi today. He was one of the founders of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and served as Chairman of the organization leading the early efforts to driver interoperability and build awareness for the Wi-Fi brand.

Phil has a broad range of experience over 25 years in the networking industry, with the last 15 years focused on wireless. Phil has served in executive level positions at companies such as Zilog, Corvus Systems, Adaptec, Xircom, Aironet, Wayport, Vivato and most recently BelAir Networks. Phil is now lending his experience, vision and expertise to OakTree Consulting and Novarum as a technical and strategy consultant.

Scott Blue

For more than a decade, Scott has been pushing the Internet to the next level. His advice is sought out by Corporate, Technical and Government leaders, as well as the investment community, for his broad range of experience in product, application, technology and corporate development. Scott first began to understand the power of the Internet when StarTarget, the software consultancy he founded, began connecting customers' branch offices to their corporate headquarters using TCP/IP in the early 90's. In the time since, he has served as the Western Regional Executive Producer of Canada's largest ISP (Now part of Bell Canada), the service development lead for one of the first ADSL roll-outs (Now part of TELUS), the Strategic Planning Officer for the Silicon Valley semiconductor start-up credited with creating what became the ADSL standard (Acquired by Texas Instruments), and the CEO of a high-flying public .com.

Scott believes that pervasive wireless broadband is the next big step in the evolution of the Internet. He is a director of a number of development stage start-ups in this area, and he has been actively involved in the creation of several new IEEE 802 wireless standards groups. To the 802, he has not only brought an understanding of what service providers need from new products, he has also been able to make use of his knowledge of radio propagation gleaned during his undergraduate degree from Concordia University in Montreal.

Scott lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife and four children.

Garth Hillman

Dr. Garth Hillman is a technology pioneer who has been involved in the birth of many new communications and computer technologies and products. Dr. Hillman worked at Advanced Micro Devices from 2000 to 2008. He joined AMD as a New Products Development Manager in their fledgling Wireless Local Area Network business focused on developing the lowest cost and lowest power .11x transceiver for the personal computer market. Dr. Hillman represented AMD on the Trusted Computing Group's Board of Directors and served as secretary of IEEE 802.11n Task Group. Dr. Hillman co-founded Motorola Semiconductors'(now Freescale) Digital Signal Processing endeavor early in his 19-year tenure there. Between his Motorola experience and AMD he held a technical advisory position Dell Computer. Dr. Hillman started his career at Nortel where he was the electronics design manager at the Advanced Telecommunications Products Division in Nashville which produced the world's first consumer electronic telephone - semiconductors, no magnetics thank you very much! Dr. Hillman earned his doctorate in Engineering Physics and bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Garth enjoys living in Austin, Texas with his wife, Monica, and being close to their family members. He likes exercising and working outdoors on cool landscaping products. Being a naturally competitive person, he is totally frustrated by the game of golf but nevertheless persists in trying to become even average at the sport when he has some spare time.