School’s in session: two wireless veterans look back

SAN FRANCISCO — The first day’s keynote ended with a trip back in time with two wireless veterans reminiscing about an industry they helped mold 25 years ago.
Craig McCaw, current chairman of Clearwire Corp., and John Stanton, founder of Trilogy Partnership, have more experience under their belts and are more wirelessly intuitive than one could imagine. Early pioneers in the industry, McCaw, founder of McCaw Cellular, as well as a myriad of other wireless ventures, and Stanton, who began his wireless journey at McCaw before moving on to form his own operations, including VoiceStream Wireless Corp. and Western Wireless Corp., gave their insight on what’s going on with wireless today, compared to their historic days.
“For 20 years, the industry has been arguing about how to do something better,” McCaw said.
But for these two, wireless began by convincing people to ditch their pagers and actually connect through wireless phone calls. “In the ’80s, everything was new,” Stanton said. “We were inventing an industry.”
Stanton described one of the compnay’s exciting and innovative moments; discovering roaming. The process was completely accidental, Stanton said, as a Seattle-based customer had ventured south to Portland with a new mobile phone and, surprising to everyone at McCaw Cellular, had been able to place a call, and it worked. The roaming issue also brought CTIA President Steve Largent into play as all three reminisced about how Largent back in his days with the Seattle Seahawks was the first spokesman for McCaw Cellular’s roaming capabilities, then dubbed “Wide Receiver.”
McCaw also recalled the heavy Federal Communications Commission involvement and to some extent mismanagement of early licensing procedures, saying that because the commission was wary of getting wireless out into the market, comparative hearings were used to decide who would get valuable licenses, which took several years. Eventually, the FCC found that process to be too time consuming and went with a lottery system that opened up the wireless industry to anyone who could fill out the right paper work.
“It was simply thrown out to the dogs,” McCaw said.
McCaw and Stanton also took turns displaying old-school handsets that they both managed to conceal inside their coat pockets when walking onto the stage.
“You couldn’t hold this thing more than 15 minutes,” McCaw laughed. “[It had] 30 minute battery power, but you couldn’t hold it that long.”
The phone’s physical limits were the lesser of two evils as the big phones also cost $4,000, and that was before the monthly service charges.
But that option seemed more appealing than the car phone, which both joked took a toll not just on the wallet, but sometimes on the vehicle. “The car phone was even worse because we had to take a guy’s car apart,” McCaw said.
“And 5% of the time, we damaged the car while doing it,” Stanton interjected.
All joking aside, both men indicated carriers face similar struggles today in getting consumers to adopt mobile data services to what the earlier operators experienced in getting consumers to sign up for wireless.
“Data hasn’t been ripe for operators or customers,” McCaw said. “When a product isn’t ripe, people won’t buy it. They don’t come until there’s something rational. Ego drives it initially.”
Just minutes after the carriers left their open-network discussion, Stanton said they must be careful when opening up their networks.
“Open networks makes us access providers and when you become access technology, you’re leading yourself to grow at the rate of the economy,” Stanton said.
Stanton spoke of the advancements and time-to-market advantages carriers entertain, saying that while carriers today gain millions of customers each quarter, it took McCaw Cellular 4 to 5 years, with a huge footprint, to sign up their first million customers. And with carriers continually pushing data upon those customers, they’re hitting road blocks.
“Customers back then and today tend to be intense,” Stanton said. “Every innovative cycle, you learn from adoption races of earlier technology.”
McCaw said cost and quality is what will change the world of data; prices need to be lowered.
“Punishing the customer is not the answer,” McCaw said. [You] have to fit a profile and when you hit that sweet spot, it’s going to explode.”
Of course both men couldn’t escape without discussing the Clearwire/Sprint Nextel Corp. partnership and the anticipated launch of mobile WiMAX services. McCaw downplayed the comparison of WiMAX with competing LTE technology by saying they’re the same in most regards, but with slightly different technology requirements. The most obvious is WiMAX’s current use of unpaired spectrum bands, while LTE is set to use paired spectrum similar to what traditional cellular networks use.
“Technologically, they’re brother and sister,” McCaw said.
The old friends ended their memories of the past with advice for the future.
McCaw talked about Apple Inc.’s 3G iPhone and its lead in device innovation in the marketplace, which he expects to only keep on keeping on and his lamenting that he was not in the device business.