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There are two ways to describe 360ø Communications. The first is to talk about things like leveraging local market presence to build national strength, fostering an original corporate culture and being committed to customer care and high-quality service.

The second is to point out that within a company that provides cellular service to more than 2 million customers in 100 markets across 16 states, the president and chief executive officer still reviews every single network drive test personally.

Both descriptions are accurate, and both provide insight into the kind of company 360ø is. But the second part legitimizes and gives life to the first: That one act symbolizes the importance of local market strength, an original corporate culture and a commitment to customer care and high-quality service.

"Our culture and the way we operate is the thing that keeps us the most nimble," says Dennis Foster, the aforementioned president and CEO of 360ø. "We've tried to be very unique.

Being both unique and nimble is extraordinarily important to 360ø because of its history and the caliber of competition it now faces. The company was once the cellular arm of Sprint but was spun off when Sprint decided it wanted to buy up 1.9 GHz personal communication services licenses to create a coast-to-coast wireless presence. The 10-year-old cellular child it left behind was put in the ironic position of being forced to forge a new identity for itself, one that leveraged everything good it had established over the years but didn't rely on the branding strength of its former parent.

That doesn't mean that everything that had already been built had to be knocked down and redesigned, however. Even before the spinoff, the cellular unit had an entrepreneurial feel about it and a very decentralized way of doing business, Foster notes.

"The fundamentals of the business haven't changed at all," Foster says. "It's been enhanced in that everyone's responsibilities have been broadened.

Those responsibilities include paying constant attention to the needs of customers in local markets while still maintaining a unified national whole, ensuring employee satisfaction, building brand recognition and equity, developing and adapting new technology platforms, and focusing on expansion by acquisition and creating new services.

Small town success 360ø continues to hone in on the mid-sized metropolitan and rural areas where it has long been a dominant operator, choosing to target its strengths toward locations where PCS competition is not likely to venture for some time (Figure 1). In those regions, the carrier has created a homey local feel largely free of any Sprint-like corporate dominance.

"Autonomy and accountability in our regions are a critical part of our success," says Kevin Beebe, executive vice president of operations.

That goes not only for customers but also for the people responsible for building and operating the regional networks. "We really rely on the culture as a differentiator," says Debra Ferrari, vice president of human resources. "Our culture is something that transcends all functional organization. A lot of it is constant communications. It's the entire team that supports the culture.

Creating brand consciousness is a challenge for any company, particularly one that is more than a decade old when it becomes new again. In February 1996, the former Sprint Cellular introduced its new 360ø Communications name and logo. The moniker is meant to convey an all-around devotion to customers and, because of bundling and service expansion plans, blur the lines that outline what type of service the company offers-a strategy Foster refers to as "all in the barrel." The unique apple-green logo is intended to distinguish the company's image from what it considers to be a sea of blues and reds.

Technology evolution is another challenge for 360ø. The company has selected code division multiple access (CDMA) as its digital platform of choice, but to date only its Las Vegas market offers CDMA, and even there digital is marketed only toward wireless high-rollers.

"Surprisingly, digital has not been a competitive factor," says Susan Amato, senior vice president of engineering and network operations. "There really isn't a lot that digital has to offer that analog can't.

The company's somewhat unconventional take on the importance of digital service is largely based on the type of markets in which it operates. In smaller regions that are mostly non-urban, 360ø's view is that quality is measured by network coverage and how many calls are blocked or dropped.

"We want to make sure that when we talk technology we're talking about things the customers want and need to use," Amato says. "We've always been very focused on building the network coverage to the point of it being very complete for our customers.

Still, having the capability to evolve to a digital platform could become more important in the long term, particularly as the company seeks expansion into service categories that are non-traditional from a cellular standpoint.

"We're bullish on CDMA because we're confident it's going to deliver lower-cost minutes," Foster says, noting that if and when the company decides to target the local service market via wireless local loop, CDMA would be the way to do it. "That can be done if you get enough discount, and down the road that's going to be a reality.

Expansion plans In the short term, 360ø's expansion plans primarily involve bundling long-distance and paging services together with its wireless offerings in its existing markets. The ability to do that is tied back again to the company's firmly established network presence in all of its regions.

"Being a standalone company has allowed us to find new ways to grow," says Beebe. "We have a local presence advantage that will allow us to drive into more than just cellular.

Regional expansion seems less important than bolstering what already exists, although the carrier did acquire Independent Cellular Network's Wireless One properties in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia last year, adding 185,000 customers.

360ø's attitude toward competition varies greatly depending on the player. Again, the smaller markets that are the carrier's bread and butter are not going to appeal early to most of the bigger PCS entities, so 360ø's real competitive target-at least for now-are local cellular operators that covet the same air it does.

"[PCS companies] have such a hurdle just to get off the ground. It's going to take awhile before they have a reasonable footprint. It takes a long time to build out a network," says Michael Small, executive vice president and chief financial officer at 360ø. "We find the scrappy local competitors are usually the tougher ones. They can't afford to lose a market-it's their whole life.

Foster concurs that local cellular competition is more of an immediate concern, but he notes that from a national perspective, the high-quality digital networks that PCS players are deploying will build higher customer expectations that must be met by all wireless carriers, no matter how large their operations.

"A good local competitor can be a challenge in that they'll focus more on price," Foster says. "PCS competition has been very good for the consumer from a quality standpoint. PCS will force everyone to build a better quality network.

In the cutthroat world of wireless, it's becoming more and more difficult for any entity to maintain a "mom-and-pop shop" image and still remain competitive. 360ø has carved a solid niche in certain markets, but the growth of the industry-and especially the rapidly increasing number of players entering the fray-dictates that expansion is mandatory for everyone.

For 360ø Communications, the challenge now is to build on the solid wireless foundation it has built to create a full service operation-complete with wireless, paging, long-distance and local service-that truly legitimizes the company's all-encompassing name.

"We've set tough targets for ourselves," says Foster. "What we're after is a bigger piece of the telecom revenue pie."