Won't be fooled again

Steve Hooper and Wayne Perry didn't leave AT&T Wireless Services simply to sow their entrepreneurial oats. They were dispatched by Craig McCaw to connect the next link of an all-encompassing telecom service plan.

It's a plan that starts and ends with AT&T. Hooper helped ensure a smooth McCaw-to-AT&T transition by serving as spiritual leader of AT&T Wireless. Perry acted as back-room baron, finding the funds to buy up the sky. Both conspired with Chief Technology Officer Nick Kauser to hatch "Project Angel," the company's proprietary wireless local loop creation.

Hooper and Perry now move on to play largely the same roles in McCaw's newest venture, OneComm. (Kauser will stay behind at AT&T Wireless to make sure the Angel soars.) At OneComm - where Hooper is president and Perry is chairman - they will apply their team-building and money-making skills to guide the strategy and development of Nextlink, McCaw's competitive local exchange carrier.

One of the first things OneComm/Nextlink will do is build out and operate local markets for AT&T. That will be accomplished through both wireline and wireless means, since Hooper and Perry are not likely to stray too far from the wireless local loop scheme they helped devise. The McCaw CLEC will then reap profits using the AT&T brand while maintaining a degree of autonomy from the corporate behemoth.

Meanwhile, over at the behemoth, 20-year AT&T man Dan Hesse steps in for Steve Hooper. While competitors scoff at what they perceive to be his wireless ignorance, Hesse will serve as the human bridge for AT&T's wireless/wireline integration process, completing the corporate assimilation of the once-independent wireless subsidiary.

None of this is serendipitous. The transition was too smooth, complete, fast and final not to have been carefully orchestrated. The conductor in all of it is Craig McCaw, who has quietly built a telecom empire by creating and acquiring local, long-distance, wireless and satellite firepower.

McCaw does not do things piecemeal. By the time Project Angel flies, the birds of the Teledesic Network - slated for a 2002 launch with a hand from Boeing - will be aloft and ready to interconnect the world.

The thing to do now is sit back, watch it all fit together and try to anticipate the next orchestrated surprise.