Frank, T's long flight to oblivion,it seems this is the last ditch effort of a desperate man. Armstrong overpaid substantially for TCOMA,they are only 3% 2-way HFC,a horrendous position to be in. TCOMA stopped buying equipment in 1996 and upgrading their plant.
Malone knows how much trouble TCI is in,cities are opting to build their own networks,like Cedar Rapids,new LEC's are targeting TCI installations to compete with,like 21st Century in Chicago.
Project Angel: A Long Flight to Oblivion
By Meg McGinity. Meg McGinity is wireless editor at tele.com. She can be reached over the Internet at mmcginit@teledotcom.com .
Early 1993: Nick Kauser, chief technology officer at McCaw Cellular Communications Co., names a wireless local loop technology that is being tested Project Dino. T he technology developed under Project Dino evolves into Project Angel.
James Barksdale is named to the board of directors at Internet startup Netscape Communications Inc. One month later, he leaves AT&T Wirel ess to become Netscape's CEO.
August 1996: Alex Mandl, the heir apparent to Robert Allen as AT&T's CEO, leaves the company to join a wireless startup in a well-publicized breakup.
In a February 25 speech to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, John Walter unveils Project Angel, calling the wireless local loop initiative "the biggest breakthrough technology in the new AT&T." Without revealing details on the technology, Walter promises that Angel will allow AT&T to compete in all local residential markets by bypassing incumbent "last mile" connections to the home. He lays out a deployment timetable that includes beta testing in Chicago in the second half of 1997 and commercial deployment by 1999. "I think it's fair to say that the residential communications will never be the same," Walter tells NARUC.
March 1997: In a March 2 story, the Seattle Times reports that Project Angel's Chicago test will involve 30,000 to 40,000 AT&T employees and customers. AT&T does not confirm or deny the report.
October 1997: AT&T names C. Michael Armstrong as its chairman and CEO. John Zeglis becomes president. The Bob Allen era ends.
AT&T announces that it is ending efforts to resell local service to residential and small business customers because of the limitations on local exchange carriers' ability to handle anticipated demand and because the discounts received from the local providers on the sale of these services are insufficient. It does not mention Project Angel as a competitive option for local service.
December 1997: The Angel trials begin in Chicago. The trials involve fewer than 10 customers, all AT&T employees, and is limited to voice service only.
January 1998: AT&T announces intentions to acquire competit ive local exchange carrier Teleport Communications Group Inc. (New York).
March 1998: Wireless Week newspaper reports that in late 1997, Mike Armstrong told AT&T executives that Angel's deployment costs had to come down before commercial deployment could happen. Armstrong issues a year-end deadline for getting Angel's costs down, according to AT&T executives.
May 1998: AT&T continues to refuse to discuss the status of Project Angel. It acknowledges, however, that to date the only infrastructure that has been set up is "very small" and "on a test basis only."
If Project Angel proves anything about AT&T, it's this: This company knows how to keep a secret. From the beginning, Angel has been shrouded in secrecy. Even executives at Lucent Te chnologies Inc.--the technology arm that AT&T divested in 1996--were kept in the dark about the AT&T Wireless project, says Chris Conroy, manager of wireless local loop (WLL) applications at Lucent. The skullduggery makes it difficult to draw a bead on the technology that underpins Angel, yet from the few details that AT&T has divulged, experts paint a less than stunning picture of a project that is now five years on the drawing board.
When he first disclosed the existence of Angel in February 1997, then-AT&T president John Walter said that Angel was based on proprietary high-speed digital processing technology that sends or receives signals between the customer's home and a wireless base station. Immediate questions were raised about AT&T's decision to rely on homegrown technology. "Why AT&T wanted to use a proprietary system escapes me because there are already a wide range of system technologies available that they could have chosen from," says Naqi Jaffery, seni or telecommunications analyst at consultancy Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).
The digital component of Angel may also be presenting problems, adds Mike Elling, product officer of investment banking and mergers and acquisitions at Prudential Securities Inc. (New York). The digital format that AT&T chose for Angel can't deliver the capacity that AT&T would need for a full, mass-market rollout, Elling contends. "What they are trying to do is win a mountain rally with a Formula One car--there are different objectives," he says. "So many projects were based on the 'build it and they will come' theory. But successful practices understand that it's about supplying what the end-user wants."
When it introduced Angel, AT&T claimed that a single base station antenna would be able to serve as many as 2,000 homes. But some industry insiders say that given that infrastructure and cost model, the service would encounter interference. Original reports from AT&T had it that one radio transmitter could provide close to 3,000 feet of coverage in a neighborhood. But sources now say the coverage area turned out to be smaller, which meant AT&T would have to deploy more base stations to reach subscribers.
That translated into higher deployment costs. Adding to the cost problem was that receivers would have to be installed not on the roof, but under a protected area of the roof on the sides of homes to minimize weather interference. The installation costs could be substantial.
Malone got his price,Armstrong got a dinosaur system which he has to make into an eagle. Will Armstrong soar? I think the wings of T might have a hard time lifting the cement block of TCI,and the East River lies below,can you say plunk?
Hiram |
