Filling Management Posts to Support Future Endeavors
WinStar has recently made key additions to its management team that will assist it in successfully expanding into the data and Internet arena.
Following the acquisition of GoodNet, David Jemmett, GoodNet's CEO, entered into an agreement to continue at WinStar as President of WinStar GoodNet.
At the same time as this announcement WinStar also announced that it has hired Howard E. Taylor, a former business unit president at SNET. Prior to joining SNET in 1994, Taylor was vice president of global marketing at MCI and has also held positions at Quotron Systems, Telenet Communications and IBM. Taylor's hire accompanies the creation of a separate broadband services group, of which Taylor will serve as president and COO. This group will focus on developing WinStar's Internet, data transport and LAN/WAN services. Both of these new hires provide WinStar the leadership and experience needed to develop a data and Internet strategy.
These new additions are healthy contributions to an already strong management base. One other notable hire worth mentioning is WinStar's new CFO, Charlie Dickson, who has years of experience from MCI (as do many
others of WinStar's top management). From 1984 until 1993 Mr. Dickson was a senior financial executive at MCI. In the four years prior to joining WinStar, he was CFO of NextLevel Systems, an equipment and service provider for advanced broadband networks.
Competition Created By LMDS Auction should be Inconsequential to WinStar
As we expected, the advent of the LMDS auctions, an auction of licenses in the 28 to 31 GHz band of spectrum, appears to be raising a higher level of consciousness toward spectrum in the 20-38 GHz range. Generally speaking, we believe that the auctions will have little to no impact on WinStar. In our view there is no spectrum shortage - the government has seen to that. And as a result the availability of spectrum should not be viewed as an important barrier to entry into any radio- based telecom business. The barriers to entry involve the process of building a business. Since WinStar is ahead of any other wireless CLEC operation in this process of building a business, and is years ahead of potential new CLECs using LMDS, we don't view this auction as competitively significant.
On February 6, the U.S. Appeals Court in DC ruled that the LMDS auctions will go forward on February 18, under the FCC's original guidelines that bar incumbent local carriers from buying spectrum in-region. This decision further supports our belief that the auctions should be fairly inconsequential to WinStar as it prevents incumbent LECs from using wireless to block the entry of new competition. |
