the life and death of fixed wireless
Post on 29-May-2018
223 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
1/24
Dot TelecomThe Life & Death of Fixed Wireless
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 1 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
2/24
Back in 2002, I was managing a 400 person department and over $10 million in corporate assets before the age of 25 and less than a year after working in a call-center for minimum wage.This is the story of Fixed Wireless a $5 billion dot-telecom experiment that could only havehappened in Redmond
The BeginningHey Tim, can I use your PC to work on my resume? Im having email troubles and I need to
send it to a company in Redmond. The voice on the phone was David Mirabal, whod been the
manager for my department at Illuminet for nearly 2 years before disappearing to take a big
dollars mystery job. Wed wondered where hed gone, but the business at Illuminet had been
fast and furious, and most of our time had gone into integrating the team with our new
manager, Dennis Sperow a former Marine Corps base-commander whod filled Mirabals
position.
David and I both lived in parts of Olympia, and he was calling because hed gotten me a job-
interview as a favor at a Seattle telco named Quintessant only a week before I guess that Iwas fresh in his mind. They were another dot-com era telecom startup with big dreams and
vague goals but to me it didnt matter, because the position had fallen through: I was still
working swing shift doing LNP telecommunications troubleshooting at Illuminet.
Sure thing, I said hoping that it sounded mellow because I was secretly worried. If David
dropped by the apartment to email his resume, then it would mean hed see the mess that my
wife and I lived in. Having a full-time job plus being a returning adult to college meant that I
didnt have much time for housework Danielle was just finishing Masters school, and also
worked. The bottom line: our apartment was trashed.
About half-an-hour later David pulled up Id started a new dishwasher load, but that still
didnt help our his & hers piles of clean and dirty laundry scattered at random through the
house nor did it help sort through the pile of old computer-parts that Id scavenged from a
dumpster to build my Linux box, placed strategically on a wall-to-wall covering of loose
college-papers and various manuals adorning our rugs. After walking in the door, though, David
managed not to comment on the mess and we proceeded to email his resume to a company
that he was telling me about called Fixed Wireless in the Seattle area.
Jason HatfieldEverybodys heard of Redmond its the town that Microsoft made famous. The mental picture
that I had before Id even seen it was a gleaming gem of high-tech corporate offices set amidstthe surrounding evergreens in the countryside. In 2000, when I moved to the area, the reality
of it wasnt much different driving back from the interview over Rose Hill, I had a westerly
view of the Lake Washington framed by the snow-capped Olympic Mountain Range, and from
the I-405 on my drive down I could see first the Seattle skyline from the 520-overpass, and
then the gorgeous cluster of glass-covered high-rises in Bellevue.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 2 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
3/24
My first interview at AT&Ts Fixed Wireless Project was in October of 1999 even before David
got the job there. At the time, Id been perfecting a unique skill set of expertise in
troubleshooting Local Number Portability. It wasnt a tough discipline to gather expertise in
at the time LNP had only been around for 2 years, and Illuminet did troubleshooting for a ton of
the smaller companies competing to steal customers away from the incumbent carriers. The
system had more holes than a block of Swiss-cheese, and failures were regular on oneoccasion it killed the phone system for an entire city government.
One of my coworkers a flashy motorcycle-racer named Jason Hatfield had actually
interviewed at FWS only a week before I did. He had similar experience, but less knowledge of
LNP, and was looking for a change from the Illuminet setting hed been in for over 5 years.
Hatfield was also looking for the higher salaries that came from working in the Seattle area,
and wanted to be on a project to get him the easy promotions that come only in a startup-
environment. At Illuminet, both he and I were stuck because of an incredibly low turnover rate
and lack of corporate expansion.
Id been talking with Jason about the Fixed Wireless project before the interview, and hed told
me that theyd offered him a position in their datacenter a big step down from the work Id
done at Illuminet, but the pay was nearly $20 per hour, which was a big step up from the
salary Id been at in Olympia. Jason had accepted the position, and I decided to drive up north
for an interview.
I only remember the first interview at Fixed Wireless as a vague recollection the commute
was an 80-mile crawl through mid-afternoon traffic, and Id had to sit in the lobby for longer
than Id wanted to while the receptionist tried to locate the data-center manager. Id like to say
that the corporate lobby was a beautiful place, but it wasnt just like hundreds of other tech-
companies in the area, Fixed Wireless was just starting out. The lobby and hallways were filledwith boxes of materials, and as I entered the building for the interview I remember seeing
bundles of cables everywhere on the floor the construction for a new customer-service call-
center was only half-complete.
The interview was short primarily because I had more skills than were required for the data-
center job. I recall driving back down and stopping by the Jeff Kimballs apartment he was
working in a call-center at Lucent and had given me his address in advance. Id known Jeff
since 3rd grade, and hadnt seen him in about 6 years, so even that recollection is more
detailed than the interview itself.
I told some Illuminet coworkers about the interview at Fixed Wireless when I came into work
later for my swing shift of the few that I told, the reactions were negative these people
simply couldnt believe that the salaries being offered in the Seattle area were sustainable,
and thought that the cost of living would make them irrelevant in any case. That was the
consensus, and it was one of the reasons that I called the Fixed Wireless office and told them
that I wasnt interested in the job.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 3 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
4/24
Getting HiredI kept in touch with David after he started at Fixed Wireless. Call me crazy, but when hed left
Illuminet there were a lot of grumblings about his management style Id been one of the few
voices of dissent that thought differently. I had more than my share of complaints about his
management technique, but despite the excellent work that Dennis Sperow had done as a
replacement, things still werent the same Illuminet just wasnt exciting anymore.
David had been working as an analyst for only about a month, and had told me a few times
that the Fixed Wireless Project needed some help. Theyd encountered the same problems that
every startup in Seattle had in 2000 lack of qualified expertise, because of an enormous tech-
boom that had sucked up all of the talent. Suddenly, tasks like doing system-administration
had gone from being something that took 20 years of training to achieve, to being something
that you could make a living on with only a basic knowledge of PCs.
During an email to check up on him in late February, hed asked me if I was interested in
working there. Despite the job-security that I had at Illuminet, I was facing the same problems
that had prompted Jason Hatfield to disappear into the FWS scene in late October. I hadnt
heard from Hatfield since then, but told David that Id turned down a data-center job at FWS at
the same time Hatfield had started there. No problem, he wrote, This is a REAL job in fact,
Im worried that you have enough experience for it, but Ill put in a good word for you
nonetheless. Just dont screw this up!
As it turns out, David was getting a promotion after being at Fixed Wireless for only a month,
the company had liked what Illuminet staff called his poor management style enough to
make him the manager of the provisioning department. As such, Id thought that I would skip
the interview and just show up to work, but it wasnt that easy.
When AT&T Wireless had decided to begin their national deployment with the Fixed Wireless
technology, they chose a consulting company to run the middle management for FWS
especially for the technology heavy groups. Inteliant, Inc had placed 40 consultants on-site
managing every aspect of the job I would be doing, and Id have to go through them to get into
Fixed Wireless.
After an intensive interview in South Kirkland at their office, I was finally offered the job, and
placed on-site in Mirabals group, reporting to a consulting manager named Noah Van Loen
who in turn reported to Colby Harper, the Inteliant Engagement Manager at FWS. The really
key benefit of being a consultant comes down to money: my consulting salary was much,
much higher than the $20/hr. datacenter job Id interviewed for months ago.
Waking NightmareI hadnt given it much thought during the interview, but as it turns out the annoying 80-mile
commute that Id had during the middle of the day was during light-traffic hours for the Seattle
area. In fact, I came to believe over time that Davids real reason for offering me the job was so
that he could take the commuter lanes with me as a passenger while he drove up everyday
from Olympia. Commuting in Seattle isnt a rural country drive instead, its an action-packed
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 4 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
5/24
journey through every town on the I-5 corridor along the way. Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater,
Tacoma, Fife, Federal Way, Kent, Sea-Tac, Southcenter, Renton, Bellevue, and Redmond each
have their own traffic problems, and the I-5 commute snakes through all of them from Olympia
to Redmond. During the month that hed been commuting to Redmond by himself, David had
learned only 1-strategy for dodging traffic leaving Olympia before 5 am.
The commuting strategy that we came up with should either win us an award or get us shot
we very nearly died quite a number of times from various traffic incidents along the way. In
theory it was simple: meet at the commuter parking area in North Lacey at 4:45 am. Due to the
time of year, it was still dark, although as March turned into May it began getting lighter at 5
am. Sunrise was usually just when we were pulling into the Redmond office. The commute
from Nisqually to South Tacoma was only a few miles, and despite the fact that we always
drove at an even 55mph leaving Olympia, we were always pushing 90 by Tacoma. Even so, we
found that if we left at 5 am, it took us about 50 minutes to drive to Redmond if we were
even a little late and left at 5:15, we wouldnt reach Redmond until 8 or 9 in the morning.
Our driving and our general patience gradually started to deteriorate. This is partially due
to the fact that the bulk of the AT&T Management Group was located in New Jersey, and they
always woke up early. Sometimes David would have to get into the car without saying a word,
because he was on a conference call with the Presidents office about one issue or another.
Even as a manager, they kept him incredibly busy. When David was driving, he was always
distracted by the conferences, and when I was driving I was always distracted by his
conferences, because hed be talking loud to be heard over road noise as we pushed the sound
barrier in my 1999 Pontiac Grand Am.
All that I remember about those first 6 weeks was the commute we had a lot of work to do,
but no matter how tough it was it was nothing compared to the drive. Wed leave at 3 pm andsometimes make it back to Olympia by 7 at night. We saw things that you shouldnt have to see
in life police pushing the burning wreckage of cars off the road in Federal Way, because
traffic was so thick that the time to quench the fire would have backed up traffic for miles. On
one occasion, David left a 20-foot skidmark of smoldering rubber on the Mercer-Island bridge,
because he was juggling two conference calls at once and dropped his phone while switching
between them we were going 80mph, and came on traffic way too fast.
The final straw was the car that I nearly hit in South Bellevue a white Japanese hatchback
parked in the middle of a 4-lane stretch of I-405, with heavy traffic zipping around it. Id been
driving since 5 am on this occasion all by myself and I was tired as hell and juiced up on
coffee doing 50 mph. Without warning, the car Id been tailgating swerved out of the way, and
all I remember was this white car coming up on me until it was only feet away. I yanked the
wheel of the Pontiac to the left so hard that the ground-effects dug into the pavement-- I swear
that I heard a crunch, and thought that my fender was gone, but when I pulled into the office
parking lot I couldnt find any damage. That was it the next day I started looking for
apartments, and a week after that my wife and I were moving up to Kirkland a cushy 5 mile
commute in light-traffic from Fixed Wireless.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 5 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
6/24
Why Fixed Wireless Was ImportantWhen David had first taken the job, despite his belief that major portions of the company had
real challenges and were completely hosed, he was incredibly excited about the technology.
The real beauty of Fixed Wireless was in what it could do, more than what it was.
The initial Fixed Wireless technology came from a small startup in Redmond they simply hada dream to replace the telephone-cables that run out to the customers house with a wireless
unit that transmits both telephone and internet-communications to a modified cellular base-
station.
The concept is deceptively simple. Most people dont realize that the last mile of
communications is the deciding factor for bandwidth if you live in a city, you may be able to
get a cable modem or DSL, but for rural markets youre stuck with twisted-pair copper that
may be over 30 years old. Its incredibly expensive for a telecom company to send out a work-
crew to install high-speed cable, and sometimes its not even possible especially in the
crowded urban environment of most cities.
Telecom companies have been trying to get around digging up the street to offer their
customers high-speed data for years one of the more outlandish ideas involves running fiber-
optic cable through sewage pipes for broadband access in skyscrapers. Fixed Wireless had the
best idea of all, though create a multi-plexed, high-bandwidth wireless signal, and then put a
transmitter/receiver for it on the side of a customers house, business, or skyscraper. You still
had to pay $400 for a work-crew to install the system, but it sure beats $4,000 to dig up the
street.
Fixed Wireless wasnt originally the brainchild of AT&T Wireless the idea had been around for
a while, but apparently had languished in obscurity until it caught the attention of MichaelArmstrong, the CEO of one of the most powerful corporations in the world.
AT&Ts Confusing Corporate StructureBack in 2000, there was one big megacorporation called AT&T. It had subdivisions AT&T
Global, nicknamed Long Lines, routed coast to coast traffic and also owned all of the smaller
sub-corporations. These smaller corporate entities sometimes had their own stock like AT&T
Wireless or AT&T Digital Cable but sometimes they didnt, like AT&T Digital Broadband, which
was the formal name of Fixed Wireless.
This all happened before I got involved, but apparently AT&T had gone on a shopping spree
and started buying things in the mid-1990s. Fixed Wireless had originally been a small
company that AT&T had acquired, the same way that AT&T had purchased McCaw Wireless
even earlier and renamed it AT&T Wireless. Apparently, they owned so many companies they
didnt even know what to call them
The original name of the Fixed Wireless project had been AT&T Broadband, which was the
same name that as the group selling cable-modems and television boxes. Renaming FWS into
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 6 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
7/24
Digital Broadband had been a measure to prevent AT&T from having to sue itself, but to all of
us it was just called Fixed Wireless or FWS.
The obvious problem was that AT&T was simply too big it literally didnt know what it owned,
or where, or who was running it. Despite being a multi-billion dollar project, AT&Ts Fixed
Wireless project was only a small part of a much-greater whole; it became the pet project ofAT&T Globals CEO Michael Armstrong.
The story had been that Armstrong had seen AT&T FWS President Michael Keith off at the
airport when the project first went live Armstrong had grabbed Keiths arm and said, This is
a REAL job in fact, Im worried that you have enough experience for it, but Ill put in a good
word for you nonetheless. Just dont screw this up!
Management 101My resume states that I managed 400 people and over $10 million in corporate assets before
the age of 25 and less than a year after working in a call-center for minimum wage. Most
people exaggerate about jobs on their resumes, but Im not one of them.
Explaining this strange turn of events really involves a description of how it all came about
something that I believe is unique in all of AT&Ts long and illustrious history.
First, however, please keep in mind that while in 2000 there were lots of dot-com millionaires
about my age who had done even better, none of them were working for one of the most
prestigious mega-corporations in the world. The yearly income of AT&T Global at that time was
over $100 billion per year, and they employed over 20,000 staff in locations all over the globe.
This wasnt a dot-com website that I was managing this was a 400 person ProvisioningDepartment critical to the deployment of a technology that AT&T had spent $4 billion dollars
and nearly 8 years developing. The reason for this is basically Davids fault.
Promotion From WithinThe role that Id been initially hired to fulfill was that of a Root Cause Analyst for the first
month, this was a pain to accomplish because no matter what I wrote, David reviewed my
work and rewrote the analysis. Its possible that this is because I wasnt proficient enough yet
at business-language to write the correct text, and its also because I didnt understand the
functional breakdown categories to lump each cause into, but I had another theory. I believed
at the time that David was scared of having me in the department, and therefore interpreted
everything I did through his own ideas of how the analysis should appear.
Whatever the case may be, I can recall doing Root-Cause Analysis as a distinct job for only
about a month as things would turn out, AT&T would have a much more interesting role for
my career than Id been assigned to do.
David had negotiated himself from the same analyst position that I was hired through Inteliant
to accomplish into the role of Provisioning Department Manager as a direct-employee of
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 7 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
8/24
AT&T Wireless. According to him, it was a step down in pay, but for his driven leadership
mentality it was a big step up in self-confidence as well as leeway to manage the work of
everything and everyone around him whether they were in his department or not.
One of the first things that David had done was to take charge of a team of 8 Convergys
consultants who had been relocated from Florida to an AT&T office in Denver and ensure thatthey were trained to his standards on provisioning and LNP so that he could use them later to
return to their Jacksonville home office and train the remainder of their 200 counterparts as
provisioners for the Fixed Wireless Project. Therefore, David had a ready-made on-site
management team, for a provisioning effort that was entirely otherwise offsite a staff of 200,
with full support capabilities, that he could use to accomplish company goals and still not
worry about the day to day management of.
It was good that David had done this, because with his mentality he would have otherwise
taken on way more than he could accomplish. In addition to managing the provisioning group,
he was providing feedback to managers in a variety of other departments on how they should
accomplish their goals whether or not they wanted the advice.
We flew to Denver and met with the provisioning group, which resulted in 8-hours of hard
work for 3 days, every one of which filled with drunken escapades at the Denver Tech Center.
Its a long story, but we basically partied like crazy I recall waking up with a tremendous
hangover on the 3rd
day, going to Starbucks for a latte, and seeing the sun come up to highlight
a several-hundred mile stretch of the Rocky Mountains. Since the tech-center was 40-miles
east of Denver and on a plateau, it was quite an impressive sight. I spent at least 1 in the actual
city of Denver, but my memory of the city was only of street-signs, because I was lying in the
back of a car completely wasted while we drove around.so wasted, in fact, that I later
stumbled into the womens room to vomit at the office when they called us in drunk atmidnight to resolve emergency system issues. Yes, it would seem that our job had become a
24x7 occupation.
The Denver trip came and went, and I began to take on additional tasks enough of them, in
fact, that Root-Cause Analysis became something of an afterthough. Soon enough, David had
me doing enough that he redelegated the RCAs to the Jacksonville team, and I took on more
important roles, such as taking care of all of the disasters that wed created.
AT&T Gets EvictedOne of these disasters were the test-houses. Ive been fortunate enough in life to have been
with the same girl since I was 17 and since she pays the bills, Ive never had to worry about
paying rent. In fact, before AWS Id never had to pay bills, primarily because my wife is a
control-freak about money. The last time before 2000 Id handled anything larger than a 50
was in college-accounting during business school (and that was in 1992).
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 8 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
9/24
As it turns out, AT&T as an organization had only slightly more knowledge about paying bills
than I did I guess this is how the test-house problems came about in the first place. When
David had taken on the job of provisioning manager, somebody had pawned off on his team the
responsibility for approximately 10 test-houses that had been rented to test the on-site
feasibility of the Fixed Wireless platform.
The test-houses were basically apartments that AT&T had rented in various locations in Texas
to iron out any of the messy technical glitches that might come up with a commercial rollout of
the Fixed Wireless technology. These houses were loaded with monitoring equipment, and the
billing for them was delegated to a group within AT&T responsible for testing the technology.
There was only one catch when testing was complete, the test-team refused to continue
paying rent, and AT&T forgot to reassign the responsibility to another group. Another
interesting tidbit was that since it was a corporation renting them and not a fiscally-
responsible family, they had picked incredibly expensive rentals and the bills were 6 months
overdue.
We were lucky in some cases some of the rental property managers had been in touch
privately with AT&T and been able to learn that they would in fact be paid. However, there
were several rental managers who hadnt heard a peep in months, and several of them had
evicted by force the AT&T test & monitoring equipment that had been located in their houses.
Truth be told, expensive and precise AT&T monitoring equipment had been sitting outside for
months at some of these locations in a couple of cases, it had been covered with tarps, but in
others nobody had taken care of it at all. AT&T had completely forgotten that it existed, and
after paying the bills, getting yelled at by rental owners, and telling the test-team that their
equipment was destroyed, we forgot about it to.
I remember talking to people all over the office literally asking for directions at each block of
cubicles in a building that seats 400 people. Where can I find the accounting department? How
can I get a bill paid? Who manages finance for the test team? At each stop, things became
more confusing and more poorly defined. For a megacorp, it would appear that this company
didnt even know who controlled its money. This was when I realized that I was doing
management work.
Mr. Smith Goes to WashingtonThe complaints at Illuminet about Mirabals management style had been vicious at one point
directly after he left Id always felt like David was a mover and a shaker, but apparently hed
been a manager in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Illuminet environment was all
about stability a place where innovation is rarely rewarded, and task completion-times are
measured in years. Davids approach was different he moved fast, and got things done, and
at Illuminet it caused him problems.
AT&T was a different environment, though at least back then. Before the layoffs, mergers,
and general losses incurred in the dot-com bust the company had more assets than it knew
what to do with, and an utter lack of people willing to take responsibility for them. For AT&T,
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 9 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
10/24
David was the perfect match instead of dodging new responsibilities, he kept asking for more
of them and AT&T had plenty to give.
While Illuminet may not have been the best environment, dont let it be said that David doesnt
have talent, intellect, knowledge, or ability. In less than 6 months time, David was promoted
from junior analyst to Director of Provisioning and New Markets. He was the go-to guy foranything important enough that the CEO cared to delegate it. He was the single most
influential person in the Fixed Wireless project, and he knew where ALL of the bodies were
buried.
When David was promoted, the provisioning department was left without a manager. AT&T
had put him in a strategic role given him the opportunity to lay out a strategy for rolling out
the Fixed Wireless platform nationwide, which meant that he was busy laying out strategies
for each new market, and working with vendors and other companies to ensure that the
rollouts went smoothly.
Unfortunately, everything was moving so rapidly that we couldnt add more personnel to our
group which meant that everything David wasnt, I became. Still being on the analyst pay-
scale, and with only the title of consultant, I became the Fixed Wireless manager of
provisioning. Day to day operations fell under my jurisdiction all of the normal issues that
David no longer had time to resolve fell into my lap, and I was doing 18 hour days just in order
to keep up.
The Anti-DavidI didnt realize it for months, but it dawned on me one day that if there was a David, then there
was probably also an Anti-David in the world and as things turned out, I had been working forhim for months without even realizing it.
If David was Jackson Pollock, then Colby Harper was M.C Escher both painters made
beautiful art, and both were talented, but their individual styles were so different that they
most likely would not have understood each other.
Colbys been a friend now for years, because hes an intellectual what I have in common with
him is an interest in analysis, planning, and control. Colbys a very controlled person he
makes long-range plans, step-by-step, and follows them through. Lots of managers do that, but
Colby does it with vision. That vision became important once we realized that AT&T had
accidentally been breaking the law..Colby was a source of assistance. This is partly because
hed helped to draft the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as an intern in Washington DC, and
partly because he was the only help that I had.
In terms of leadership style, both Colby and David brought indispensable value to the business
the challenge that I had to face was sorting out which qualities of either to model in my own
career.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 10 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
11/24
In another life, Colby could have been Thomas Jefferson well-spoken, even-tempered, and
statesmanlike. The fact that hed helped draft the legislation for what was basically the
constitution for LNP only reinforces that perception.
However, in fairness, if Colby could have been Jefferson, then David would have been Teddy
Roosevelt. The reason that David excels at impossible tasks is because he approaches everychallenge as if hes leading the charge up San Juan Hill (on horseback, sword drawn, and
shouting follow me, men!). Obviously, neither approach is complete without the other. Davids
Pattonesque approach to problem-solving got us into and out of more sticky-situations that I
care to mention.
Breaking the LawConspiracy-theorists like to hypothesize that international corporations create big master-
plans to break the law methods that they can use to take over society and reshape the world
into their twisted, unworkable vision of the future. In my experience, though, its not a
conspiracy just lack of planning. At AT&T, a twisted, unworkable vision of the future was
what we did every morning before we went into the office to do our real work.
AT&T had acquired the Fixed Wireless technology several years before they rolled into the
marketplace with it in fact, theyd gotten stalled at some point before the deployment
process on provisioning-system issues and had pushed back their deadlines until they were
finally issued a mandate for national rollout in 2000.
Having only 90% of the business in place and a mandate to go ahead no matter what the cost
was a bit like a teenager getting pregnant. So youre 15 years old, and babys on the way
now what do you do? The answer is simple: you grow up in a hurry, and people get hurt along
the way.
One of the key parts of Local Number Portability is something called a SPID number it
stands for Service Provider Identification Number and is attached in the LNP databases to each
and every phone number that gets ported. In brief, this was part of the LNP process
mandated in 1996 when the Federal Government decided that customers should be able to
change phone-companies and still keep the same phone number.
LNP is a pretty complex process even inside the telecom world, and Fixed Wireless was doing
something really unique. They had a technology that was inherently Wireless in nature, and
were porting numbers with Wireline Carriers, 3 years before that became officially legal. It
worked by a wireless box on the side of a house to provide telephone and wireless-broadband
internet service by connecting to a cellular basestation, and AT&T had to get special
exemption & permission from the FCC in order to launch the service. In other words, it was just
barely legal to begin with, since nobody else could do it without going to prison.
Fixed Wireless was designed to replace the land-lines that customers in their rollout markets
already had so it was created from inception as a service that virtually required LNP in order
to operate. AT&T could give customers a unique phone number in order to add them without
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 11 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
12/24
having to go through LNP, but since the number pool that FWS drew from was assigned to
AT&T Wireless, that meant giving non-LNP customers a wireless number. This caused trouble
in a number of ways, including destroying Caller-ID and phone-book lookups, because in the
Wireless world these either dont exist, or else dont work the same way.
When Fixed Wireless launched, they hadnt really been prepared I guess that a mitigatingfactor might have been that things were complex enough that nobody could have been fully
prepared, but in AT&Ts case they missed a lot of things. One of these was the SPID number
because it was a new identifier, and because we were a subdivision of AT&T, the Fixed
Wireless group had been given a SPID of 7125 to use when porting in customers. We went
ahead and began using this number after all, when the chief office tells you to do it a certain
way or else, you dont often ask questions as it turns out, we should have.
The SPID number of 7125 didnt belong to Fixed Wireless in fact, it didnt even belong to
AT&T Wireless. The SPID number was one that the Cable-group was planning on using when
they rolled out broadband cable-modem phones, which they postponed until 2003. Wed been
adding customers with regularity to this SPID, and once we realized it, we also realized that it
broke more than a couple of FCC mandates.
The SPID-debacle was really the first opportunity that Id had to work with Colby Harper in a
one-on-one setting. At this point, I was still contracting through Inteliant, and while Colby had
been promoted to National Engagement Manager the SPID crisis brought him out of the
woodwork when he started getting calls from Vice-Presidents at AT&T.
For about 2 weeks, everybody was scared. Keep in mind that Id only been there for maybe 6
months, but wed already added about 20,000 customers to a legal reference number that
couldnt be easily changed especially without attracting the notice of the FCC.
Id been doing 18 hour days for a while theres nothing like spending so much time at work
that the dog barks at you when you come home at 2am. I was incredibly tired, not thinking
straight, and used to solving issues with some expediency, because we didnt have time for
anything else. So when I found out that 7125 wasnt the Fixed Wireless SPID number, I asked
several people none of them knew. I asked David, and he was busy with strategic planning,
so he told me to find somebody who did know so I asked the FCC.
It was innocent enough for me but apparently the FCC wasnt amused when I called them up
and very naively said, Hey, Im Tim Ventura from the Provisioning/New Markets Group at
AT&Ts Fixed Wireless Project. Do you guys know what our SPID number is? I didnt get fired,
but they must have told somebody in our company, because all of a sudden I started getting
lots of calls from the Presidents office not just Michael Keith, the President of Fixed
Wireless, but from John Zeglis the president of the company that owned us, AT&T Wireless.
I think that part of the reason that we didnt get fired was because we didnt HAVE a SPID
number apparently nobody had realized that we needed one before adding customers, and
didnt set one up. I worked with Theresa Keeler in the assigned numbers group for about two
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 12 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
13/24
weeks before finally obtaining one from a startup-competitor that wed acquired and then
promptly forgotten about.
I was nervous for a while after that theres nothing like showing up at 8am and having Vice
President Karl Korsmo and 2 other VPs waiting at my cubicle to casually ask, So, hows the
SPID problem coming along?
The Other LawsOf course, this was just the big one that I encountered during the dot-com era in general, the
attitude towards employers was a bit more relaxed, mostly because employees were so
scarce that corporations had to cave to ridiculous demands just to operate. This attitude of
employee-invincibility led to a lot of lawbreaking in the tech industry, and more at Fixed
Wireless including drunk-driving, tons of drug-abuse, strong-arming contracts from
employees and vendors alike, sexual harassment, and employee theft especially after the
layoffs started. Most tech-sector companies put anti-theft locks on their laptops we were
putting them on 2-ton mainframes.
In fact, in a couple of famous scandals, the company offered to give the thieves brand new
laptops to replace the ones that had been stolen, because theyd taken equipment with
incredibly sensitive data on the hard-drives. In my case, that meant packing my laptop home
every night, and backing up my desktop machine every day, simply to ensure that the work I
was creating was still there when I came in the next morning.
Where does a mistake end and a lie begin? My long-time friend Jeff Kimball came on-board at
the FWS project after Id been there for about 6 months when he started, he went through
Inteliant for IT consulting on Unix Servers. His negotiations were unique they asked him whathis salary requirements were, and he told them that he made 40. What he meant was
$40,0000 per yearas a Lucent call-center salary but the recruiter, who was used to dealing
with strong-arm tactics up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, assumed that Jeff meant
$40 per hour. When Jeff started, hed effectively doubled his salary from day one and I was
glad for him. Inteliant was strong arming AT&T for $60 an hour no matter how much Jeff made
from that in return.
OverworkedMost people will tell you that overworked means that you spend too much time at the office.
At Fixed Wireless, overworked had new meaning you work so much that you gradually start
to lose touch with reality.
When I was at Illuminet, I complained once that I had to work an 18-hour day. At Fixed
Wireless, that was normal we were always working. During the day, I spent my time doing
staff training, streamlining processes, setting up systems, handling employee issues, and in
meetings with VPs.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 13 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
14/24
At night, if I wasnt still at the office I was thinking about it. Overworked is when the woman on
the phone at midnight has to tell you that shes your wife. I used to have dreams about
Microsoft Excel, but the worst example was a situation that David still doesnt believe
happened.
David missed our carpool one day when I was still commuting up from Olympia I was justpassing the Sea-Tac airport when I saw a 747 lifting off from runway. My phone rings: its
David. Hey, he says, Im on a conference-bridge and couldnt call because my plane just took
off. This is about the point that it dawns on me that hes actually a passenger on the 747 Im
looking at. Anyhow, he continues, I have some action-items before I jump back on the
conference br..zzzzbrrpp..zz.
The pilot, who was telling the control tower that somebody on the aircraft with was using their
cellphone during takeoff and it was interfering with communications, had interrupted David. I
hung up the call and waiting another 5 minutes before calling him back.
One Last FlingNobody knew it at the time, but the Los-Angeles trip was going to be the last really fun part of
my AT&T Fixed Wireless experience. Ive already mentioned that I managed 200 persons at the
Jacksonville office the other 200 came on later at the Teletech office that Fixed Wireless
funded in North Hollywood.
As it turns out, North Hollywood is NOT Hollywood. The difference is simple remember the
shootout on TV in 1998 where the gunmen had AK-47s and were blasting holes in cop-cars?
That happened on the street outside of our office in North Hollywood.
AT&T had required an office, and they found that location dirt-cheap they paid for a companycalled Teletech to setup 200 workstations, and sent Mirabal, myself, and 8 other people down
to set it up.The staff was theirs, the work was ours the mandate given to David was simple:
One week or youre all fired I dont care how much it costs, just get it done.
That mandate had included David apparently from Michael Keith directly. I dont know if they
were serious about the firing part, because we finished the task in 5 days with honors. I know
they were serious about the money, though
With 5 people on our expense account, we managed to spent $25,000 in 5 days. Apparently,
when David heard I dont care how much it costs, hed interpreted it as a challenge like
telling a 12-year-old boy that he cant possibly eat an entire pizza.
We stayed in the Universal Studios Hilton Hotel David hadnt been given enough notice to
reserve normal hotel rooms, which were all booked because it was the week after Christmas
during a giant convention. He did the only thing that came to mind: he reserved 5 of the
special suites on the top floor that apparently only celebrities and football teams use.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 14 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
15/24
It was interesting to have a view straight down onto the Universal Studios Themepark when
youre in the top floor of the hotel it looks nearly vertical, despite the fact that the hotels not
even very close to the park. It was also interesting to have a automatic shoe-shine machine in
my room, although I noticed that it didnt work well on cowboy boots.
The most interesting thing about staying in a hotel with David, though, is the parties. I canrecall sitting with all 8 team-members under a beautiful, gigantic glass-chandelier getting
drunk and then beyond Drunk. One minute Manny Campa was asking about provisioning, and
the next minute Davids pouring shots of GoldSchlager down Mannys throat because Manny
cant hold the shot-glass himself.
For 5 straight days, we worked our assess off from 5 am to 6pm then we went to the finest
restaurants in Los Angeles, and then drank so much we threw it all upthen wed go back to
work the next day and do it all over again. THAT is how we spent $25,000 in five days.
The Beginning of the EndI figured that wed all be fired when we got back from Los Angeles I felt sick for days but as
it turns out upper-management was really pleased with our work. The kiss of death was
something that none of us and none of you would have ever expected.
David had asked me to track a stock that he wanted to buy using the Yahoo! Stock tracker
while we were in Los Angeles. Since I was installing software on PCs and yelling at the New
Jersey team, it wasnt hard to keep reloading the page when I wasnt busy training 200
provisioners on LNP.
David had indicated that the stock was for a chip-manufacturer that had created a new wafer
technology not better, but cheaper. Apparently, the forecasts were saying that this $15 pershare company could end up being the primary supplier to Intel, and David told me that when
the stock hit $20 during the week he was going to buy a ton of it.
The stock never hit $20 per share in fact, as I kept watching it over 5 days, the numbers kept
dropping first to $13, and then down to $7. Then the company went out of business. The dot-
com bust was starting.
I hadnt seen the economy rise during the 90s, but I recall the Dow hitting 6000 in 1997 and
the news-anchors on TV talking about an all-time high. In 2000, it was over 10,000, and
everybody that I knew was making money. In fact, I was the only person that didnt own stocks,
because Id only been making steady cash for a few years and had invested in moving to the
Seattle area the price of housing wont eat you alive, but its not cheap either.
At first, I thought that it was poetic justice a 25-year-old sysadmin whod complained about
his job for years because he had $100,000 in AOL stocks suddenly had to start working again.
David apparently lost a fair amount also hed figured on retiring at 45, and that idea went out
the window pretty rapidly.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 15 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
16/24
Tims New JobThe year 2001 wasnt the year that Arthur C. Clarke had told us about in fact, wed made it
through Y2K unscathed and ended up being hit by the biggest recession since the Great
Depression of the 1930s.
Inteliant, who Id been with for over a year, suddenly sold to Herrick Douglass, Inc when thestockplunge had them sell off their Redmond division. Only a couple of months later, Herrick
Douglass went bankrupt from the merger, and forced a mad-scramble for jobs at Fixed
Wireless with people whod previously been comfortable as contractors.
When the scramble first started I thought it was paranoia by this time David had hired a few
employees, and didnt have the budget to keep me onboard. No problem I dropped by
Director Andre Carters group and told him to hire me for the E-Commerce systems.
Transferring from Provisioning to E-Commerce was easy same meetings, different players.
When youre used to calling the shots, and used to getting your way, moving from one role to
another isnt a challenge. At least not at first.
I started seeing the paranoia from the economy really hitting home in March of 2001. By then,
the stock market was really slipping, and people were really losing money. Herrick-Douglass
going bankrupt wasnt an exception it had become the rule.
The rumors had actually started in December of 2000 I saw one of the senior System
Administrators packing up his cube one day and asked him about it. He told me that he was
taking a job at Washington Mutual in Seattle because Fixed Wireless wont make it through
the year. I wrote the comment off, because AT&T had spent billions on us they werent going
to just throw that investment away. Also, if 90% of the employees were going to be laid offtomorrow, I would have been one of the remaining ones. my job was secure.
The Real TransitionI didnt realize how much of my worth in the organization came from my work with David until
Id transferred out of his department. Sure enough, working for Andre Carter was a unique
experience, but at the same time rather limiting. Andre reminded me a bit of Colby a very
stable, honest, and intelligent man, but without some of the excitement that Id had in the
provisioning department.
Over time I began to realize that what made Mirabal unique - and what Id come to expect in a
position - was Davids inherent risk taking. Its a part of any business, because every business
involves risk. However, in Mirabals case hed integrated a higher amount of risk into his job
than any other Director in the organization, which is probably why hed progressed so rapidly
in the organization. Simply put, Davids gambles paid off more often than not, which meant
that AT&T could count on profits from this risk, and not the liabilities that accompany less
informed risk-taking. However, it would be this very same risk that would ruin the department.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 16 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
17/24
Id been working in IT for several months when we started hearing the first rumors of a layoff.
At that point in time, Id been talking about layoffs for nearly two years after all, AT&T has a
tendency to literally collect useless employees, and Id been making a list: it was nearing a
hundred people that the organization could easily do without. Most organizations can support
a certain amount of chaff, but Fixed Wireless had more than its share. At first, the idea of a
layoff was a welcome notion.
Layoff #1We didnt hear about the first layoff until nearly June of 2001.since I was in IT, we started
discussing it in meetings, and the team nearly universally agreed that Kimball was going to be
the first from the team to be laid off. Id been a dissenting voice, partly because Ive known Jeff
long enough that he was family, and partly because Fixed Wireless IT department contained so
many useless individuals that even 1 hour of Jeffs time could equate to a week of these
peoples work.
We didnt have much choice though by switching to IT I had inadvertently lost a good deal of
the power that Id had in the Provisioning Department, and as a side-effect was put in the
position of being a newcomer in an already semi-established group. I was still a mover and
shaker, at least in that my word became law for the E-Commerce systems, but nonetheless I
had an inability to influence policy like Id had on Mirabals team. I was feeling isolated, alone,
and powerless and things were about to get worse.
Id been in IT for over 4 months when the first layoff was announced we heard that it would
impact different departments in different ways, but that people from every team in the
company would be impacted. When something like is announced, teams begin to talk who
would it be? In the IT department, we were pretty sure that it would be Jeff Kimball, whoddone an excellent job managing the Gabriel FWS base-station provisioning system, but had lost
a lot of time from the office and been in deep depression as a result of his mothers recent
death.
Jeff was indeed layed off in the summer of 2001 but in a very surprising turn of events, so
was David Mirabal. In fact, the Provisioning group not only lost David, but a number of the
team-members that Id worked closely with, which made me wonder how much politics had
influenced the list of those who would go, versus those who stayed.
In hindsight, and with the knowledge of what had happened to the economy, I now realize that
it was the risk-taking that cost David his job. He was a high-roller in a changing industry that
could no longer afford risk-taking. Things had changed from growing the business to remaining
stable, and instead of playing golf and hob-knobbing with other millionaires; CEO Michael Keith
was now flying around the country looking for funding in an attempt to save the Fixed
Wireless.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 17 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
18/24
Summer of 2001When something bad happens in a persons life, often times the stress of the event causes the
person to self-destruct even further. In Jeff Kimballs case, it had sent him reeling into
depression, which made him a target for the layoff. One negative event had spurned two
others by the way that hed reacted to it.
Organizations can be the same way, and after the layoffs AT&T Fixed Wireless began to
change. At the time, we were being told that the changes would help the company streamline
and become profitable, but in reality the senior leadership team was running scared.
From mid-2000 to mid-2001, the fundamentals of the Fixed Wireless business as interpreted by
management hadnt changed very much wed expanded into 15 new markets, and added
nearly 100,000 paying customers. Michael Keith was making good on the promise that hed
given to Armstrong years ago, and despite a bumpy road we were on-schedule and learning to
work within a budget.
From my perspective, the only fundamental factor that really changed was the psychology.
Most of the management staff laid off in the summer had been Type-A personalities big
spenders and risk-takers. I think that most of the remaining management team took this as a
message to focus on stability rather than growth.
We still had plans to change the world, but in the short-term wed been re-tasked to keep
things stable for a while presumably until the economy got better, which we were still
optimistically thinking would happen in the near future.
Ex-EmployeesWhen people get laid-off, theyre dead to the corporation they become casualties of war inbusiness and are expected to go quietly to the unemployment office. However, theres a larger
reality to things, which is that those employees stay in the community and it damages the
companys reputation. Also, no matter what the justification is for letting them go, nobody feels
like they deserve to be laid off, and in the case of Fixed Wireless politics had been a factor in
the decision-making process.
I could write a book about the psychology of a lay-off, but suffice it to say that the Fixed-
Wireless ex-employees were pissed off about the summer layoff and whats worse is that
they were organized. During later layoffs in 2002, the general depression had gotten bad
enough to really destroy people, but back in 2001 there was a righteous indignation after all,
I wasnt the only person whod put in overtime without compensation in an effort to achieve
company goals. The fact that the Type-A risk-takers were primarily affected didnt help things
either these were exactly the kind of people that you didnt want to piss off, and I started
hearing bad stories about Fixed Wireless from acquaintances in the community with no
connection to it at all.
At the office, we were beginning to hear rumors of an informal network of ex-employees that
were meeting up every week. From what Id heard, this included at least a few ex-Vice
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 18 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
19/24
President types and a ton of high-paid ex-techies theyd co-opted the local Billy McHales bar
on Friday nights to trade stories about FWS, help each other look for jobs, and presumably plot
some kind of revenge on the company. Many of these people had been relocated to Redmond
from all over the United States because of our local labor shortage, and other than the office
theyd never had time to put down roots in the local environment. Fixed Wireless was all they
had, along with stacks of bills piling up from expensive lifestyles and a lack of financialplanning during the boom.
Id spent a good part of the previous year building up my contacts with technical recruiters I
was getting calls regularly for jobs all over the United States, and despite the fact that the
number of offers I was getting had declined by 2001, I still had lots of contacts that I could
refer resumes to. This was something that I was doing in my spare-time for a few months, and
thought that things couldnt get much worse in the marketplace but what happened next
changed not only me but everyone I knew.
The Big BangAs the manager of the Fixed Wireless E-Commerce platform, Id had many discussions about
web-design with the graphic-designer doing layout for the marketing departments new site. Id
been doing web-design and E-Commerce since 1996 on the side, and had been up late the
night before writing a code example that Id promised to show the developer when I came into
the office.
The kitchen phone woke me up I ignored it for several rings and it went to message, but
when the ringing started again I stumbled upstairs and picked it up. Groggy and confused, I
realized that it was my wife on the phone, calling me from the school that she taught at
shed left for work over an hour ago. She kept telling me to turn on the TV to watch the news,
and I remember telling her that whatever it was, it could wait. She insisted, though, and when Iturned on the TV still set to Fox News Channel I could immediately see why. An aircraft had
flown into the World Trade Center.and while I watched, not really awake and not fully
comprehending what was going on, another aircraft slammed into the second WTC Tower on
live TV.
September 11thRedmond, WA is just about as far away from New York City as you can get, but because I
worked for AT&T we had offices and coworkers right near ground zero. The divestiture had
already happened, which meant that we were slowing cutting our ties with the New Jersey
central office, but I began to realize after about an hour of trying to work that on September
11th
, virtually nobody else was in the office.
From 9am to approximately lunch, people had been trickling out of the office into the break
areas at the ends of each building televisions mounted on carts that were normally used for
video-conferencing were tuned into CNN and Fox News, and groups of 50 or more people were
clustered around each one of them.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 19 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
20/24
I remember that the impact of September 11th didnt really hit me until after I left work I
recall coming home and becoming violently ill, throwing up so hard I thought that I would pass
out. I also remember that in the week after September 11th
, the New Jersey senior-
management team for OSS systems was non-functional, because theyd taken their vacation
time to hand out food and water at ground-zero to the rescue-crews. Everybody was doing
what they could my wife and I donated a thousand dollars to the Red Cross, and bought littleflags to put in our car windows.
Corporate ImpactI didnt realize it at the time, but September 11 th was the ultimate kiss of death for Fixed
Wireless. The economy, which wasnt in good shape at this point anyways, responded by nose-
diving straight down taking the tech industry with it. Wed been trying to keep optimism up,
but we were beginning to realize that things were going to get a lot worse before they got
better, and it was going to destroy the company when it happened.
In late September, I sent an email to Michael Keith Id always interacted with him through
David Mirabal in the past, which meant that several months had elapsed since Id heard any
word on what he was doing. As the President of Fixed Wireless, I knew that hed been on the
road looking for funding, but I also realized that the annual cost of FWS was great enough
that the chances of finding that kind of money were slim.
Keith wrote me back with an optimistic message with British overtones: chin up, stay
optimistic, and were going to make it thought the tough times to keep the company alive.
The AnnouncementI dont remember very much about the time in between Keiths second email and the
announcement, but when it came it was unexpected. Wed been hearing about a second layofffor over a week, but since there had been recurring rumors of this ever since the summer
layoffs Id figured that it was just the nervous anxiety that had existed for the better part of
2001.
When it came, it was swift and decisive and Michael Keith made a blooper now bitterly
retold by ex-employees nearly every time they mention the good old days at Fixed Wireless.
Wed all gathered in various conference-rooms for a company-wide message from Keith by
this time I was expecting a second layoff, and wasnt worried until Keith started speaking. His
final words in the speech were meant to be humorous, so dont put that down payment on
the second house. Nobody thought it was funny.
The divestiture at the beginning of 2001 had split AT&T from a single business-entity into 4
discreet parts and when the divestiture happened, it took Armstrongs vision of Fixed
Wireless with it. The FWS division had been given to AT&T Wireless, partly because of location,
and partly because of the technology. The Cable group had gone its own way, and later was
absorbed by Comcast.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 20 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
21/24
Fixed Wireless had been making definite strides to become a financially independent entity,
but it had been burning through over $1 billion per year as it grew and added new markets. It
had grown into an 800 person company, and additionally had a gigantic contracting staff
these expenses, as well as the cost of placing equipment all over the United States, had kept
the cash flowing out the door pretty rapidly.
When AT&T Global had owned Fixed Wireless the impact of spending a billion dollars on it
every year wasnt life-threatening after all, their gross income was $100 billion per year, so it
was only about 1 percent of their yearly revenue. AT&T Wireless was a different story, though
they had only $10 billion in revenues every year, and in the middle of an economic downturn
it hadnt been difficult for the Board of Directors to close a costly and unpredictable
experiment that theyd been forced to take responsibility for.
Michael Keith made the announcement that AT&T Wireless was going out of business, and that
there would be 3 major layoffs in 2 month increments to allow the business enough time to
finally push all of the acquired customers back to their original carriers. Therefore, the time to
elapse between the announcement and the actual doors closing was nearly 6 months -- Id
been hoping to stay until the very end so that I could bitterly watch them lock it up.
A Strange Twist of FateId been friends at Illuminet with a fellow named Richard Luck hed been a mentor of mine in
learning Unix, and hed gone to work at a telecom-company in Seattle trying to launch a cable-
broadband phone-product. His company closed in late 2000, and hed resented only being
given 2 hours of notice before the doors were closed forever. There were a number of dot-com
bust stories that were similar quick closures without notice.
Fixed Wireless was different probably because it was so big. Its hard to pin down the exacttime that it closed, because with 3 layoffs the staff size and customer base really just dwindled
down to zero over time. It didnt end with a bang it ended with a whimper.
Of the 800 employees that Fixed Wireless laid off, only 50 of those were able to transfer from
Fixed-Wireless over to AT&T Wireless to dodge their scheduled FWS layoff dates.
For me, the story really ends in January of 2002, when I transferred from Fixed Wireless to
AT&T Wireless in Bothell. I mentioned earlier that Id thought that even if 90% of the staff were
laid off at Fixed Wireless that I would have been one of the remaining staff-members. As it
turns out, the strange twist is that I was right.
Post-MortemMy scheduled layoff had been in January, the first of the 3 layoffs. Despite dodging the axe by
transferring, I was unexpectedly laid off from AT&T Wireless in May of 2002 less than a
month before the final layoff of staff from Fixed Wireless.
After each of us left AT&T, the people that Id been friends with for years were blown to the
wind each went their own way, and for the most part we lost touch. Since Id moved from
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 21 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
22/24
Fixed Wireless in January, I wasnt able to see the company before it was finally closed for
good but the rumor was that by the time the doors were locked there was only a skeleton
crew remaining of 10 or 15 employees. The rest had found work in other industries, although
telecom and the tech-industry were tight enough that many of them remained out of work for
nearly a year after the company closed.
Redmond had gone from being the best place on Earth to live in 2000, to the worst place to
work in 2002 finding a job in telecommunications was impossible, and the recruiters that Id
been talking to were telling me scare stories about people from the Fixed Wireless summer-
2001 layoff who remained out of work even when I left in May of 2002. Some of my former
colleagues didnt find work until 2003, and most of them left telecommunications for less
damaged industries.
ConclusionWhat were the things that killed Fixed Wireless? Ive given this thought a number of times, and
have some ideas none of them are definitive, but there were a lot of lessons that we learned,
many of them simply too late.
First, by 2001 the Fixed Wireless technology was under assault by the promise of inexpensive,
easy-to-deploy high-speed mobile broadband through the Wi-Fi 802-11B and later G standards.
If Fixed Wireless had gone live in 1998, it would have beat this newer, better technology by
over 2 years, but since it had waited until 2000 it was unable to compete effectively.
Second, the mentality of the startup-company that had created the original Fixed Wireless
technology hadnt carried over when AT&T took over the project. Management had bloated the
staff and slowed down the release of everything from the technology itself to even minor
aspects like software upgrades. AT&T had taken a quick, nimble entrant to the market in 1996and turned it into a dinosaur by 2000 and we all know what happens to dinosaurs.
Third, AT&T was victimized repeatedly by vendors. Companies would come along regularly and
sell AT&T new solutions for already-working systems that either didnt solve the problem or
didnt work at all. As corporate policy, wed actually tried to add a clause to our vendor
agreements for a full-refund if this ever happened again, but the most that we ever got was
free service as the vendor sent out technicians to attempt on-site patches and repairs. Selling
someone a broken replacement for a working system was a common strong-arming technique
it came right before charging the customer for labor to fix the problem.
Fourth, because of the labor shortage in Redmond during 2000, AT&T Wireless had brought in
a lot of employees whod never worked in telecom before. This was especially true for the
Vice-President level staff, who nearly always had unrealistic perspectives about schedules,
costs, and other business variables. Simply put, the company was run at the Director level,
because the VPs were all busy trying to learn telecom instead of managing it.
Finally, simple fear killed Fixed Wireless the combination of the economy and September 11th
fueled pessimism in the company that ate it from the inside out very rapidly. People like David
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 22 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
23/24
Mirabal, whod been hit by the summer 2001 layoff, were the lucky ones for the rest of us,
showing up everyday meant having to see everything wed worked on falling apart around us.
Most of the problems that eventually killed Fixed Wireless had either been solved by the time
the company went under, or could have been solved on a predictable schedule. The
technology was and remains unique, and no major challenges emerged to a nationaldeployment that would have prevented it from becoming successful.
In conclusion, Fixed Wireless remains in death what it was in life one of the most remarkable
telecommunications technologies ever developed, and something that very nearly changed
the world. Its also a lesson for companies still on the brink of disaster, and hopefully contains
some hope for the future the big ideas are still out there, and the only thing that can really
stop success is the perception that youve already failed.
AfterthoughtIrony comes in many forms, and I simply cant shake the inescapable black-humor of events
over the last few months. You see, Im doing contract work at AT&T Wireless in the Redmond
area, and theyre getting ready for a buyout by Cingular Wireless. Every day, I see employees
preparing themselves for the corporate death that theyre sure will cost them their job, and
yet I remain unworried because the contract Im on is temporary to begin with. They bring
former FWS employees like me back because of our skills, but most of the AT&T staff doesnt
like what I represent one of the greatest failures in the history of the company: an endeavor
called Fixed Wireless.
Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 23 of 24
-
8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless
24/24
top related