Call me Spooky

I'm beginning to feel a bit like "The X-Files'" Fox Mulder in a slump as I watch my conspiracy theories about AT&T's local and wireless strategies crumble all around me. But unlike the indefatigable Spooky, who wants to believe in the paranormal so much that he'll never give up the chase, I'm ready to admit that there's no such thing as an Angel.

Even though it has yet to be publicly acknowledged, the merger of AT&T and Tele-Communications Inc. means sounding the death knell for AT&T's technologically ambitious but economically flawed wireless local loop scheme, code-named Project Angel.

The new generation of AT&T management has apparently decided that a one-way video network notorious for poor quality and customer service problems represents a solid and cost-effective avenue for local residential service entry. Better, anyway, than deploying a fixed digital radio system that represents more than five years of R&D and was one of the reasons the company spent millions of dollars acquiring wireless spectrum.

The theory I've been spinning consists of Craig McCaw as a sort of behind-the-scenes master of the network universe, quietly but efficiently controlling a web of local, long-distance, terrestrial wireless and broadband satellite networks, and the companies and people that run them. I still believe that web exists, but I no longer believe AT&T is involved, or needs to be.

I also believe now that the exodus of several key figures from AT&T Wireless last summer-figures who left to work for McCaw enterprises-was not part of an intricate plan to redistribute talent in the web, but rather the abandonment of a sinking ship. Having squashed the entrepreneurial attitude of the wireless company it acquired from McCaw, AT&T has succeeded in making an important technological capability and service offering just another part of its service bundle.

Rather than confronting the cost issues that deployment of the wireless local loop scheme would create and figuring out even what limited role the technology might play, AT&T has decided to pin all its local hopes on a cable TV network. Do you want a company that is capable of doing only one thing at a time to be your multiservice provider?

Fox Mulder continues to search because he believes someone, somewhere, has something to hide. I stopped searching because I realized AT&T is not keeping secrets-it's just making mistakes.