John Zeglis, Renaissance Man

It's not unusual to leave a trade show loaded with tchotchkes, but Legos? That's what AT&T Wireless chairman & CEO John Zeglis gave out during his Supercomm 2000 keynote, but you had to wait until the end to learn why.

Zeglis certainly had a kid's enthusiasm as he predicted that within a decade, all calls and most information retrieval would be via wireless.

"Are we in the right industry or what?" Zeglis asked the standing-room-only crowd. "This must have been what it was like to work in Florence during the Renaissance."

Sort of. The Renaissance took the better part of three centuries to play out, but the industry doesn't have the luxury of time, especially when it faces three key challenges: spectrum, privacy and user-friendliness. Zeglis put a fresh spin on a familiar theme — insufficient spectrum will stunt wireless' growth — by tying spectrum policy to socioeconomic policy, in this case the much-ballyhooed "digital divide." "A divide does exist," Zeglis said. "There is a problem."

For wireless, it's also an opportunity — if the government helps.

"There's nothing like the spur of competitive opportunity to accelerate the provision of service to people and places once thought impossible," Zeglis said. "This is where we do need the government as partner. This is where we need to cooperate in making public policy that pries open closed markets and prevents the incumbents from squeezing new entrants. We also need to create level playing fields even where public financial support is needed to extend service. We can have it both ways: subsidy and competition. Just let the customer choose the carrier, deliver the financial support to the winner and watch us compete the price down."

Zeglis didn't blame the FCC for spectrum shortages and even argued that chairman Kennard and others in Washington understand the problem.

"This isn't whining and complaining," he said. "This is a call for a deliberate, conscious, forward-looking spectrum policy, one that helps us bridge the digital divide."

One area where Zeglis didn't welcome government intervention is in ensuring consumers' privacy, a potentially thorny issue as wireless data and location technology become prevalent.

"Nobody feels in control when the technology remembers more about you than you do," said Zeglis, who argued that regulation is a costly and circuitous remedy. "If we don't give customers what they deserve, government will step in and do it for us."

Success, particularly for wireless data, also hinges on user-friendliness. Zeglis pointed to the dozens of minutes and keystrokes he spent finding a restaurant using his handset. A better customer experience, he said, stems from a network that knows the user's location, preferences and needs, and uses them to track down the most appropriate suggestions.

Achieving that ideal requires a team effort. Zeglis agreed with the conventional wisdom that no single company can do everything well, so partnerships between wireless providers, vendors, application developers and content providers that leverage each company's strengths are key.

"This is a team sport," Zeglis said. "Nothing snaps wallets shut more quickly than having to choose between competing, incompatible standards and between services and products that don't interoperate. Simple and seamless are good. At AT&T, we will be good collaborators."

How? By providing its partners with many of the building blocks — hence the Lego analogy. The rest, Zeglis said, would come from Supercomm 2000's exhibitors. "Nobody ever had a bigger Lego set than here at Supercomm."