Cellular Phones-Mobile Phone and Cellular Industry Books 2

Cellular & Mobile-Cell Phone Industry Books
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Here is a gripping narrative of scientific detection that chronicles an unprecedented journey of discovery by Dr. George Carlo into the impact of cell phones on human health. This book is a clarion call sounding the message that consumers need not allow themselves to become guinea pigs for new technologies whose long-term health effects are unknown. It is essential reading for the 90,000,000 Americans currently using wireless phones, and the millions who may begin using them in the future. In 1993, as news reports appeared of people using cell phones who'd also developed brain tumors, Carlo was hired by the cell-phone industry to affirm the safety of its product. He soon learned there was little research into whether these phones could impair human health, and no consensus among scientists on the question. Carlo's own research intensified his concern, especially the startling discovery that human blood cells could be damaged by the radiation emitted from a cell phone. He made urgent recommendations to the industry, including a plea that cell phones not be marketed to children. Yet, phones emblazoned with cartoon characters soon hit the market. In 1999, the industry quit funding the independent research directed by Carlo, investigated his private life, and began a whispering campaign that sought to discredit him. Appalled but undeterred, he has now brought his case to the public in a powerful assessment of the dangers posed by wireless phones-with safeguards readers can use to protect themselves-that is destined to be placed alongside such classics as Silent Spring, Microbe Hunters, and The Coming Plague.

"With cellular telephony... we saw an enormous gap between what was and what should be. I mean, [the fixed phone system] makes absolutely no sense. It is machines dominating human beings. The idea that people went to a small cubicle, a six-by-ten office, and sat there all day at the end of a six-foot cord, was anathema to me" So says Craig McCaw, who staked what once amounted to $3.5 million dollars of long-term debt on the idea that in the not-too-distant future, America would be ready to cut that six-foot-cord... and whose epic risk paid off big in 1994 when AT&T bought for $12.6 billion the nationwide cellular-phone empire McCaw had for the past decade stealthily patched together, leveraged buyout by leveraged buyout.

His story is told here by O. Casey Corr, who covers business and technology for The Seattle Times. Corr starts with the 1969 death of McCaw's broadcasting-tycoon father, whereupon Craig and his superrich Seattle family realize they are actually flat broke. At once risk-loving and shrewd, young Craig starts buying one small cable outfit after another in the Pacific Northwest as the fledgling industry picks up steam through the 1970s. But sensing the real wave of the future is the wireless phone, McCaw seizes on the FCC's mid-1980s decision to jettison its Byzantine application process for wireless regional franchises in favor of a lottery system--a move that transformed wireless speculation from a sleepy insider's game dominated by AT&T into a nationwide feeding frenzy, all at a time when cell phones and their transmission were still wildly expensive and their mass popularity more than a decade away. Leveraging one high-risk purchase against the next, eventually with the help of junk-bond king Michael Milken, McCaw gobbles up most of the infant markets. But he's smart enough to dodge his debt by selling off the entire thing to AT&T in 1994 for a dazzling $12.6 billion. He has since moved on to future-minded projects such as Teledesic, his $9 billion partnership with Bill Gates, Boeing, and Motorola to create what the book calls "an Internet in the sky, a satellite network that provides fast, cheap Internet access worldwide."

The dissolution and triumphant reconstruction of the McCaw family fortune is an intricate tale of shrewdly choreographed deals, and Corr tells it well, in an assured, crystal-clear and tautly paced entrepreneurial narrative. That said, Money from Thin Air does a better job of dissecting the technical minutiae of McCaw's empire-building than it does at dramatizing or interpreting the personalities or psyches of its main players, foremost McCaw. Corr tries hard to paint McCaw as another of those quirky, New Economy, redwood forest visionaries à la Bill Gates, full of complexities. But Corr fails at making much of a vivid character of McCraw or hitting the essence of what drives him to take such vertiginous risks. Perhaps that has to do with the one quality in his subject he seems to nail--McCaw's seeming desire to be as invisible (or, many of his employees would say, inaccessible) as possible. By Corr's own admission, McCaw agreed to all of two interviews for this book before he got bored and politely waved Corr away. You may not get caught up in the characters of Money from Thin Air, but you'll keenly follow McCaw as he profits his way across the frontier of an emerging telecommunications market. --Timothy Murphy