Billionaire Craig McCaw, the man who really made the cellular phone business come alive, was born into the industry.
The 50-year-old Centralia, Washington native learned the business from his father who struggled throughout McCaw's youth to build a company in the radio and television industry, incurring large debt.
As a teenager, the young McCaw helped the family business by stringing cable and selling door-to-door subscriptions for a cable TV service. While McCaw was away at college at
Throughout the 1980s, McCaw sold shares in his company to larger enterprises and acquired the licenses needed for emerging cell-phone services. He gradually put together a national network and, in 1986, he bought MCI's cellular and paging operations.
McCaw Cellular Communications soon became the industry leader.
In 1993, he sold McCaw Cellular to AT&T, pocketing $2.2 billion through his Seattle-based investment company Eagle River Inc.
Over the past couple years, he has made a number of bets in the wireless world.
One of them, Teledesic, aims to set up a satellite-based data service that can deliver high-capacity "Internet-in-the-Sky" services anywhere on Earth. However it is a few years from launching even the first of its 288 satellites. Service is targeted to begin in 2004.
In the meantime, McCaw's strategy is to showcase two innovative communications services: Nextel and NextLink.
Nextel is a mobile dispatch company that uses a unique bandwidth and a set of Motorola-built radio phones that were initially sold to truckers and cab companies. NextLink is a small, competitive local exchange carrier created to install, maintain, manage and sell fiber-optic cable telephone services to businesses.
Add one more piece to this collection -- CablePlus -- a small company that actually installs fiber optic cable networks and connections, and the McCaw telephone strategy comes into full view: a full-service telecommunications empire, all provided by McCaw-controlled entities.
advertisement
