Editor’s Note: Each year, the RCR Wireless News editorial staff chooses the person we think has impacted the wireless industry the most during the past 12 months. This year’s choice is industry veteran and Cyren Call Communications Corp. founder Morgan O’Brien. Nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, O’Brien’s Cyren Call proposed a radical plan to solve public-safety interoperability issues that continue to plague first responders. That plan drew strong criticism from many in the industry, which did not agree with Cyren Call’s plans for sharing valuable 700 MHz spectrum between public and private interests. That criticism prodded many to offer their own remedies, which include a multitude of creative solutions to a problem that all agree needs to be solved.
Morgan O’Brien recounts the story about being at a charity event a few weeks after he let go with his latest brainchild at the Federal Communications Commission in late April-nearly 20 years after his last bombshell hit the then-duopoly cellular industry. The disruption 20 years ago involved the heretical notion of competition. O’Brien, several years before Congress put wireless competition in vogue, believed a more dynamic marketplace could be brought about by cobbling together frequencies of small radio dispatch operators around the country and re-packaging them under a new company. That company, which went on to be wildly successful, is now the second half of Sprint Nextel Corp.
“Just when the industry was settling down from what you did to us before, you come along again,” the wireless lobbyist told O’Brien. To which O’Brien replied: “A settled-down industry isn’t a good thing. . For the public, it’s good to have competition, disruption. Disruption is good. Now as a shareholder of Nextel, I don’t necessary think so. But that’s just the way this business works.”
Indeed, for his inspired trouble-making, O’Brien was RCR Wireless News’ inaugural Person of the Year in 1993. Now he’s back for a second tour. And the wireless industry, the Bush administration, Congress and the public-safety community are all taking note. The four national wireless carriers count on-indeed plan for-competitive twists and turns within their sphere. They did not plan on someone like O’Brien coming along-again. Stalwart Silicon Valley types betting big on WiMAX didn’t either. The same goes for telecom policy establishment in the nation’s capital.
O’Brien has jolted the government and major industry stakeholders from a comfort zone in which talking about fixing long-overdue problems often gets confused with doing so. O’Brien wants to make it happen, make it real.
This time around, with the creation of Cyren Call Communications Corp., competition serves both as a means and a healthy marketplace byproduct for an even bigger and more critical end-game: safety of life. It is about vastly improving first-responder communications, whose deficiencies were tragically highlighted in the critical hours following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and horrific hurricanes that pounded the Gulf Coast last year.
The Next Big Thing now pushed by O’Brien & Co. is as obvious as it is controversial. The idea, quite simply, is to give first responders the same level (or better) of communications capabilities taken for granted by hundreds of millions of cell-phone and Internet users every day. First responders lack the kind of fat pipe many citizens routinely access to send and receive massive amounts of multimedia data at home and work. But it’s even worse than that for first responders: They cannot even talk to one another during emergencies because public-safety spectrum is a splintered mess of narrowband frequencies.
CoCo Communications Corp. and other firms have promising interoperability products-the kind Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff envisions will take his agency out of line of fire when Democrats take control of Congress next year. But those solutions do not come close to the comprehensive solution public-safety agencies around the country say they desperately need. The lack of interoperability is a symptom of a far bigger crisis in public-safety communications in the post-9/11 world.
Private-public profitability?
Unabashed altruism by a maverick who already has pocketed millions of dollars and could make millions more in far less hostile settings? Hardly. O’Brien wants Cyren Call investors to get a fair rate of return through a management contract with a public-safety broadband trust if things work out the company’s way. But there is plenty of good-will hunting here, too. Cyren Call is far from being a whimsical get-rich-quick scheme dreamed up by O’Brien and pursed by wireless industry veterans like himself.
O’Brien said the concept of the private sector addressing public-safety communications requirements in profitable manner pre-dated then-Nextel Communications Inc.’s 800 MHz interference with public-safety agencies on the same band. The laborious process of remedying the problem, he explained, gave him even greater insight into and appreciation of the depth of communications woes-from funding to technology to spectrum-faced by first responders throughout the nation. Indeed, he approached Nextel’s board of directors with a business proposal based on a private sector-public safety model. The board didn’t go for it. Then along came Sprint Corp.’s $35 billion “merger-of-equals” pitch for Nextel in late 2004, which O’Brien said made his proposal less compelling and, quite frankly, an unnecessary distraction for one of the small national wireless carriers with an uncanny knack for scarring off would-be suitors at the moment of truth.
A pinch of chaos
“So I left and took out a new fresh sheet of paper, not shrinking away from any thorny problems,” said O’Brien. “What’s the solution? It was right around this time last year. I had to go though a complete dialectic with myself to say, ‘Am I ready to put my head back into the jaws of controversy, opposition, personal attack-the stuff that happens when you stand up and try to make big changes?’ Obviously, I concluded that I was. . When I think about where we are this year, where I am-in terms of the way I feel about things versus where I was last year-I know I did the right thing. Although I’m the first to admit I underestimated how hard it is to start again, how hard it is to be a startup mode, how hard it is to have to have so much opposition, how hard it is to be an agent of change. It is very difficult and you have to sustain it day in and day out.”
Difficult is an understatement. The $100 billion mobile-phone industry strongly opposed the Cyren Call plan. So did House telecom subcommittee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who most likely will cede leadership of the panel next year to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.).
The FCC also seemed a bit thrown off by the Cyren Call proposal. The agency waited six months before putting Cyren Call’s petition for rulemaking on public notice, only to reject it days later in early November because changes sought by the startup require federal legislation. The FCC left the docket open, drawing widespread public-safety support-though not all firm endorsements-for key principles of the Cyren Call blueprint for the way forward.
Many support improving first responder communications. It’s actually quite a fashionable policy posture these days. But few people have a notion about how to make it happen, at least without having to make painful choices. Still, Cyren Call’s plan to create a trust to manage the construction and operation of new, state-of-the-art broadband public-safety network built by the wireless industry and shared with first responders has prompted Verizon Wireless and others in the wireless space to think up alternatives.
There’s little convenient or comfortable about the Cyren Call plan. O’Brien wants federal policy-makers to transfer half of the 60 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that Congress managed to shake loose from digitally bound TV broadcasters after years of trench warfare. Twenty-four megahertz of that spectrum already has been earmarked for public safety, but Cyren Call and other public-safety organizations do not believe rules governing its use-even if refined-will do the trick.
As such, O’Brien would have policy-makers take off the auction block 30 megahertz of prime real estate mobile-phone carriers and WiMAX hopefuls would gladly pay high dollars to access. The U.S. government would love to have their money, seeing that it might help ease a U.S. budget deficit of $250 billion, give or take a few billion. But then again, there’s a reason U.S. lawmakers created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002.
O’Brien, with the Cyren Call plan in hand, is essentially taking the White House and Congress at their word.
So having been shown the door by FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, what next?
Cyren Call has petitioned the FCC to reconsider the bureau’s rejections of its broadband public safety rulemaking petition, but that’s not where the game will be won or lost ultimately.
“2007 is Congress. Absolutely Congress,” said O’Brien. He said Cyren Call and public safety groups are working with Republicans and Democratic lawmakers in hopes of getting legislation introduced early in the 110th Congress.
“Anybody who says Congress considered and rejected this proposal doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” O’Brien stated. “The legislation that everybody focuses on is a dichotomy-give spectrum to public safety or give spectrum to commercial [entities]. That’s been the dialectic. Our proposal is right in between those two. Our proposal says share spectrum between public safety and commercial. You can’t tell me Congress considered that. That model is a totally different model. That’s that proposal we’re putting on the table. Whether there’s enough political will to make the change to adapt to that new idea, we’ll see.”
O’Brien said he has no illusions about going up against the powerful wireless lobby. In fact, he doesn’t plan to so to speak. Instead of hiring an army of additional lobbyists, O’Brien said public-safety officials from states and districts nationwide will be enlisted as foot soldiers to take the message to Capitol Hill.
Democratic success in capturing the House and Senate is seen by O’Brien as a boost to Cyren Call and public-safety’s legislative campaign, but not for partisan reasons.
“This isn’t so much Democrat vs. Republican. It is new guys vs. old guys,” said O’Brien. “I believe because there are now new guys involved we have a much better chance because the new guys don’t have the same commitment to the DTV [digital TV] legislation [freeing up 24 megahertz for public safety and 60 megahertz for commercial auction]. So, yes it helps us. It still requires bipartisan support. . We won’t win if we don’t get it.”
O’Brien’s outward calm and confidence belies a fierce passion and determination beneath the surface. He relishes death struggles of the kind he foments every two decades or so. He does not think about losing, and stubbornly living to win over skeptics. That is what makes him a serious threat to wireless carriers and such a disruption force in industry, government and public safety.
“If you have been lucky enough to go through something like the Fleet Call-Nextel experience, then when you choose the next-and probably last thing you’re going to do professionally-it has to have scale,” said O’Brien. “It has to matter. It has to push the needle.”
