Former AT&T President Alex Mandl has recruited the best of the best to fill the ranks of Teligent. Does the start-up have the collective business and technological intelligence

Alex Mandl is at once predictable and surprising. He is direct, forthright and authoritative, but while you might expect him to be truculent he is not. He is articulate, intelligent and savvy without being affected.

Years of experience leading successful companies also have made Mandl very convincing. Spend less than an hour with him and he will instill in you a sense that what he and his company are undertaking is absolutely right.

That's a mandatory trait for someone whose professional track has taken the kind of turn Mandl's has. One year ago, Mandl resigned his post as president and chief operating officer of AT&T Corp. to become chairman and chief executive officer of Associated Communications, a start-up venture with yet-unfulfilled wireless broadband delivery dreams.

His departure from AT&T sparked a frenzy in financial circles as well as the press. Rumors swirled that Mandl left AT&T in a huff--and for an estimated $20 million signing bonus--because he was tired of waiting for Chairman Robert Allen to step down so that he could step in.

Some of those rumors may be true, but Mandl said then that he liked the prospect of building an entrepreneurial entity free of all the corporate baggage that bogged down AT&T. He is also a self-proclaimed advocate of wireless technology--an assertion that his AT&T record supports--and anxious to apply it in new and innovative ways.

Mandl has his work cut out for him at Associated, which recently recast its identity as Teligent. The company is in the process of establishing itself as a competitive carrier that will deliver local, long-distance and broadband data services to small and medium-sized business throughout the country. The twist is that its transmission method of choice is a high-speed, high-frequency digital microwave network.

To become the leader in that business, Teligent must first overcome the stigma of being what many perceive to be an inexperienced start-up banking on an unproven technology. Again, Mandl has his work cut out for him.

Best in class The first myth Mandl would like to squelch is the one that categorizes his company as young and inexperienced. From the beginning, he has made it his business to recruit an all-star team from various realms of the telecom industry with the express purpose of clearing the primary hurdle of the start-up: sluggishness.

"The thing that was particularly important then--and still is today--was to assemble a team of people seeking the same opportunities so that we would have the talent to pull this off," Mandl says. "We really have accomplished that."

Indeed, from Mandl on down, the roster of executives at Teligent reads like a who's who in telecom. Buddy Pickle, Teligent's president and chief operating officer, is at age 40 an industry veteran in his own right. Most recently he was executive vice president of MFS Communications, where he helped broker the company's acquisition of UUNet and later became UUNet's president and COO.

That accomplishment apparently marked the apex of his MFS existence, so Pickle began to seek outnew challenges.

"I believe the world is broken up into two types of people: pioneers and settlers," Pickle says. "I was getting into a settler's role, and that's not what excites me."

Larry Harris, Teligent's senior vice president and general counsel, is the company's resident regulatory guru. He has done two tours of duty as a senior regulatory executive at MCI as well as a stint as chief of the Federal Communications Commission's mass media bureau. He is now responsible for Teligent's "political relationships," which includes those with the White House, Congress, state and federal regulators, and fellow carriers.

Teligent's policy wonk waves off questions about the uncertainty of chucking a long and distinguished career for a start-up. "You'd be foolish not to realize the risks, but I don't have a fear gene," Harris says.

Teligent's point man on technology is Keith Kaczmarek, senior vice president for engineering and operations. Kaczmarek was lured from PrimeCo Personal Communications, where he was responsible for engineering and launching what became the first commercial code division multiple access network in the U.S.

Kaczmarek, who also has held wireless technology posts at Nextel, AirTouch and GTE, likens Teligent's plans to what he helped PrimeCo accomplish.

"[PrimeCo was] approaching a new market opportunity and bringing competition to somewhere it hadn't been before," Kaczmarek says. "That's really the same thing we're doing here."

Beyond that, Kaczmarek relishes the chance to get his hands in something new that could ultimately be something great--regardless of the risks involved. "There's something incredibly exciting about start-ups," he says. "Maybe I have startup-itis."

Directly across from Kaczmarek on the marketing side of the business is Richard Hanna, senior vice president for sales and marketing, who faces the heady task of creating a name and building a reputation for Teligent. Hanna's pedigree consists of stints as president and CEO of MFS Intelenet, in addition to marketing posts at AT&T, MCI and Sprint.

Through contact with wireless service providers that approached MFS Intelenet about resale opportunities, Hanna came to realize that the business customer base the company was targeting to provide competitive telecom offerings might be better served by wireless means.

"I said there had to be a better way to do this," Hanna says. "It has to be easier to shoot it through the air than dig up the street."

All of Teligent's top executives also justify their recent career shifts by expressing a profound respect for Alex Mandl and complete confidence that together they will accomplish what they are attempting. Part of that comfort likely stems from the fact that Mandl is not messing around with staffing--he truly has recruited a varied and experienced group of seasoned warriors from all camps to help Teligent erase the perception that the company is plagued by inexperience.

"Given the requirements for getting there fast, we didn't want to spend an enormous amount of time on the learning curve," Mandl says.

Been there, done that The second notion Mandl and company collectively discourage is the one that labels the wireless technology they are using as new or unproven. To them, it is simple and elegant--and well-established.

"It really isn't rocket science," Kaczmarek says. "We don't believe there is really any fundamental technological risk."

Teligent is designing its network using a point-to-multipoint digital microwave transmission platform that uses Class 5 switches and is capable of transporting multiple services simultaneously. The company's licenses were originally issued in the 18 GHz band, but Teligent was relocated to 24 GHz following a dispute with broadband satellite hopeful Teledesic. In exchange for moving higher to avoid interfering with Teledesic, Teligent was given an additional chunk of spectrum.

The company already is serving a handful of customers in 31 of its markets and plans to start rolling out full-scale operations next year. Its ultimate goal is to build out digital microwave networks in 74 cities within four years and hook them all together with a long-haul backbone network.

For Teligent, the simplicity of implementing the broadband wireless technology means economical deployment, quick time to market, fast transmission speeds, dynamic bandwidth allocation and high capacity.

"The radio technology gives us a lower-cost, higher-speed access method that should give us an advantage in the marketplace," Hanna says.

Teligent's plan is to offer fixed access services to business customers housed in office buildings and corporate campuses--locations that can be served with unobtrusive, inexpensive rooftop antenna equipment that transmits to rooftop-mounted central communications nodes. Those nodes connect to switches that facilitate transport to local, long-distance or Internet pipes.

What Teligent won't have to deal with are the challenges of engineering a mobile network with hundreds of sites that can accommodate mobile wireless users. "We don't have the dynamic concern of mobility," Kaczmarek says. "Everything's bolted to a rooftop."

Teligent's youth does have certain advantages: Because it has no network history, the company also has no existing back office customer, business and operations support systems that must be updated to step into line with the transmission networks.

"Not having a big legacy base in place makes it easier," Mandl says. "We're not encumbered by existing stuff."

Despite the importance of building high-quality networks that will meet or exceed the quality and capability of what is out there--namely, fiber optic transport networks--the simplicity of the technology Teligent is using allows the company to direct much of its attention to another important matter: customers.

"Technology is not the only answer," Mandl says. "Customers care about quality, cost and reliability. If you address these issues, customers will talk to you and give you a try."

Brick by brick Teligent's customers are businesses, but its rooftop approach to delivering connectivity allows the company to set its sights a little broader than specific companies to which its services might appeal.

"You really picture buildings as your territory," Hanna says. Teligent's plan of attack is to decide which buildings to hit, based on both where they are located and who occupies them, then market to tenants. Rather than broad-sweeping TV and newspaper advertising campaigns, the company plans to use direct mail, in-building informational kiosks and sponsorship of seminars and other events. This targeted approach will allow the company to more efficiently use its ad dollars, Hanna says.

In Mandl's view, that building-by-building approach toward eventually establishing a widespread network footprint has advantages beyond just marketing--particularly when compared with traditional wireless networks.

"When you build out a cellular network, you have to put it all in place before you can put on the first customer," he says. "With what we're doing, you can incrementally build out the network as you expand your customer base. You in effect finance yourself as you build the revenue base."

Teligent's expectations for how its service offerings will be accepted follow a similarly incremental scheme that begins with voice and proceeds into what Mandl calls "nuclear abilities"--services such as high-speed data and videoconferencing.

"Voice telephony is still a major part of anything that goes on, but it's also clear that growth will come from a lot of other areas," he says. "The trick is to position yourself with customers now by offering high-quality telephony services at an attractive price."

Once Teligent has cracked the door via voice, it can begin demonstrating to its customers the value of adding dedicated Internet access to their service suites, says Hanna.

"We need to sell the value of our ability to get customers on a dedicated service," he says. "They're still learning why they need it."

Given the magnitude of what Teligent is expecting to deliver to business customers, the company is not anticipating much carrier interconnection business at first. Hanna attributes this to Teligent's own supply limitations rather than carrier demand, however. He expects that the company's network capacity will be tapped out to the point that it will not initially be able to accommodate carriers' needs.

"Until you have enough buildings up, I don't think you have enough critical mass to get the [interexchange carriers] excited," Hanna says. "As costs continue to drop and customers continue to expand, you're into more of the carrier wholesale business."

The members of Teligent's executive layer tend to take a high-level view of what their company is doing. Clearly, their tasks can be broken down into categories--technology development, regulatory haggling, network construction, marketing planning--but ultimately the orchestration of those categories is the paramount issue.

"In the end, the name of the game is execution," Mandl says. "That's not a minor task."

For Pickle--the man charged with ensuring that the company meets its goal--that not-so-minor task is what keeps him up at night. But it is also the reason he is where he is.

"Execution worries me," Pickle says, "but it's the same enormity of the task that excites me."