Wireless Nation. - Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution by James Murray - book review

Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution

By James Murray (Perseus, $27.50)

NEARLY 117 MILLION Americans subscribe to mobile phone services, and a monolithic telco industry, led by AT&T and its offshoots, calls the shots. Things were different back in the early '80s. Talk show figure Mike Douglas used to host late-night infomercials offering regular folks a chance to buy not mobile phone service but an actual chunk of the wireless industry.

In Wireless Nation, James Murray explains how we got from there to here, beginning with the genuinely weird story of how the Federal Communications Commission, lacking a good way to distribute the valuable licenses that are the heart of the cell phone business, decided to throw the whole thing open to a lottery system. It was a federal giveaway worth billions, and any American who could come up with a few thousand dollars could get in on it.

The bootstrapping cowboys and eccentric entrepreneurs who raced into the cellular gold rush were inventing an industry; some reckless and unconventional deals went down in the process. The Grand Alliance, for example, was a 1984 operation in which a motley gang of cell players would assemble at a pastrami- and cigar-scented New York law office to swap spectrum licenses in wild, all-day trading sessions - something they weren't even sure was legal at the time.

Most have long since sold out to the big boys (some for millions of dollars). But in their time, they managed to kick-start a moribund industry and, for better or worse, inspire a decade of frenzied investment in telecommunications.

Murray captures a time when small players made a difference - or at least made their fortunes - in a nascent industry. As today's colorless wireless companies struggle, it's hard not to wish that those folks could get another chance.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Standard Media International
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group