Word: nextel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Other companies are zeroing in on the rich business market. Nextel is wooing corporate customers by packaging radio, paging and telephone services into discount-priced bundles. Controlled by Craig McCaw, who sold his cellular business to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion, Nextel aims to establish itself in regions covering 85% of the U.S. population...
TELECOMMUNICATIONS. Even as telephone and cable-TV companies join forces to wire up America, cellular firms are racing to create networks in the air. Last week Nextel Communications, a New Jersey wireless company, gained just such a coast-to-coast system when it acquired the cellular operations of Dial Page of South Carolina plus the mobile-radio business of Motorola in deals valued at $2.7 billion. The combinations will pit Nextel, a firm with 200,000 customers, against AT&T, which agreed to pay $12.6 billion for McCaw Cellular last year. Also in the fray are Nynex and Bell Atlantic...
...With Nextel and its other new partners, however, MCI joins the intense jockeying for position on the information highway. For many companies, the jam-up has had an unnerving effect. Last month's breakup of the planned Bell Atlantic-TCI merger came about after the two sides failed to agree on a purchase price. Last week Liberty Media, which is controlled by TCI chairman John Malone, said it wants to form an alliance with Blockbuster Entertainment in a deal that could threaten the already shaky Viacom-Paramount-Blockbuster merger. Another contender, Time Warner, announced that an expected spring start...
...grand plan may not go altogether smoothly either. In Nextel, MCI is buying into promising but yet unproved technology. To rebuild the dispatch system, called specialized mobile radio, or SMR, into a communications network that can compete with cellular, Nextel and its partners will have to invest at least $1.8 billion. And even then there is no guarantee that SMR will be able to match or catch cellular, an already proved technology with about 13 million subscribers. In addition, cable and phone companies are developing so-called personal communications networks, or PCNS, a futuristic portable-phone service that is expected...
Richard Liebhaber, MCI's chief technology strategist, notes that the company is not alone in its support of Nextel. In addition to MCI, Nextel is backed by Motorola, Comcast, Northern Telecom, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone and Matsushita. "We're part of the telephone version of a dream team," says Liebhaber, dismissing Nextel naysayers. After all, once there was another start-up company that began as a radio dispatcher for truckers and also defied the odds: MCI itself...