the life and death of fixed wireless

8/9/2019 The Life and Death of Fixed Wireless

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Dot TelecomThe Life & Death of Fixed Wireless

Dot.Telecom: The Life & Death of Fixed Wireless Page 1 of 24


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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.



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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.



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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



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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.



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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



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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



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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).



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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,



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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.



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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



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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



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.



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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.



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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.



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.



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.



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



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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.



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.



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



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



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.



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the life and death of fixed wireless

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