The cellular industry’s inception in the United States is made up of thousands of stories of business leaders, technology gurus and ordinary people each pursuing for one reason or another an unproven and unpredictable industry made possible by the federal government’s free gift of spectrum to anyone willing to apply for it.
In a new book due out this summer, wireless industry veteran James B. Murray Jr. details some of those stories. Murray’s book, “Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution,” published by Perseus Publishing, takes the reader on a lively journey through some of the spectacular, unbelievable and important events that formed the foundation of the cellular industry.
“The deals that had to be done to get these (licenses) consolidated and into the hands of big operators that really wanted to operate them were some of the more hilarious and some of the more outrageous,” said Murray. “There were all kinds of shenanigans that went on, and during that process, those few of us that were actually in the middle of it negotiating the transactions would sit around at CTIA and PCIA conventions and say, `This is just incredible. Somebody ought to write all this down.”‘
And so Murray, a decade later, decided to do just that.
The book opens with an introduction to Bob Pelissier, a truck driver from California who took a huge gamble in 1985 after seeing a television pitch for ordinary citizens to invest in the infant cellular industry. Pelissier, who put up $37,500, went on to win the license covering Manchester and Nashua, N.H.
“There were literally hundreds of Bob Pelissiers, and we could have told a similar story with different names and a different twist a dozen times at least,” said Murray. “We just picked Bob Pelissier as an example of a process.
“The stories that are in this book are just a fraction of what happened because there were hundreds of markets, and each one was won by somebody, and they were often widows and orphans and completely inexperienced business people,” said Murray.
The story of Pelissier’s lucky foray into cellular is intertwined among the many stories Murray tells in the book, including some familiar to wireless industry veterans. The book includes stories of ordinary people, like Pelissier, who stumbled onto a pot of gold by taking what at the time would have been considered a foolish risk. It also details the rise and fall of players that were poised to rule the cellular industry, such as Western Union and Graphic Scanning, that never realized their full potential because of missteps and misdeeds. And it follows the unlikely success of a start-up company from Bellevue, Wash., which changed the wireless industry with its aggressive consolidation of cellular markets large and small.
“My favorite stories are often of the inexperienced people who won these licenses, who just had no idea what they owned, had no idea what value it had,” said Murray. “Even the people who were trying to buy it from them for millions of dollars didn’t know for sure what it was worth. In retrospect, nobody ever paid too much.”
Murray said he worked on the book for four years. More than half of the material, he said, comes from events he knew about at the time they were happening, with the rest coming from interviews with the key players and research.
The stories Murray tells are rich with details and focus on the human element of the events. For example, Murray describes the scene during the settlement process for the variety of nonwireline licensees in a process aptly dubbed “The Big Monopoly Game”:
“An aroma of pastrami, sweat-damp collars and cigar smoke hung thick in the air at the Rubin Baum law offices during the last week of September 1984. For one week, the conference room smelled more like a New York city subway platform than the Fifth Avenue offices of a powerful law firm.
“Inside the conference room, an extraordinary scene was taking place. Businessmen and lawyers, ties askew and brows furrowed, were milling about, calling out the names of cities like traders on a stock exchange floor.
“`Who’s got a Fresno for an El Paso? Or how about a Toledo? Anyone need a Toledo?”‘
Murray’s account of the early cellular days is bolstered by his own story. Murray, along with a small group of investors, applied for all the available licenses in round four, the first round for which the FCC had pre-announced that it would use a lottery system. Murray’s group pooled its chances with 18 other applicants in a settlement group that eventually won four licenses. Murray and his partners arrived at a meeting with their settlement group, hoping to trade some of their shares for a majority stake in one market. Instead, they learned that McCaw Cellular had already bought out the majority of the partners in each of the markets.
The event was typical of what was happening across the country.
“It was a really fun, outrageous time when nobody knew what things were worth and nobody knew what was going to happen, and there was just wonderful speculation,” said Murray. “It turned out that almost anybody that touched it in any way ended up making money.”
While those in the wireless industry will likely be interested in the book, Murray said he hopes it appeals to a larger audience.
“The average American I don’t really think appreciated the fact that the federal government gave away billions of billions of dollars worth of public property and gave it away in a fashion where ordinary citizens could have gotten in on the gift if they learned about it and applied,” he said. “I think that story, that fundamental concept, is still something that is understood by very, very few people. Maybe the book will help people understand.
“If the federal government had given away Yosemite National Park or the Redwood National Forest, people would be outraged, and yet they’ve given away something just as valuable by giving away the radio spectrum, and virtually no one uttered a whimper,” said Murray.
