Western Wireless

» see wwireless.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

There was a kind of American phone company that existed only because the big carriers did not want the work. The customers were spread across counties rather than cities, the towers cost the same to build either way, and the arithmetic only closed if you were willing to run a cellular network for a few thousand people at a time. Western Wireless called itself the country's largest rural cellular operation, and it ran that business out of Bellevue, Washington for eleven years.

Its origins are a chain of holdings rather than a founding. John W. Stanton and Theresa Gillespie started Stanton Communications in 1988 and put money into paging, alarm monitoring, voice mail and private cable, including cable in the Soviet Union and cellular in Hong Kong. Stanton built Pacific Northwest Cellular from 1992 and took the chair of General Cellular Corporation the same year, after his firm and the investors Hellman and Friedman bought control of it. In August 1994 those two cellular companies were merged into one and the result was named Western Wireless. It covered sixteen states and about 5.2 million potential customers on day one.

The stock went public in May 1996 under the ticker WWCA, 12.65 million shares, and with a bond offering alongside it the company raised $430 million net. By the end of 2004 it held licenses in 88 rural service areas and 19 metropolitan ones, roughly 11.5 million potential customers, and had signed about 1.4 million of them. That ratio is the whole business model in one line.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the two brands ~

Western Wireless sold under names that were not its own. The analog cellular service in the rural markets went out under CellularONE, a brand shared across a loose federation of unrelated operators, so a customer in Montana and a customer in Texas could both be CellularONE and have no company in common. The digital PCS service in the cities went out under VoiceStream.

VoiceStream was the valuable half and everybody knew it. On 3 May 1999 Western Wireless spun it off to its own shareholders as a separate listed company, on the reasoning that the market was pricing the combination at a discount to its parts. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream two years later for $30 billion and renamed it T-Mobile USA in 2002. The parent that had made it kept the rural half and went on selling phone service in places with one tower and no second option.

None of this shape exists where I grew up. Turkish mobile service in those same years ran through a very small number of national operators covering the whole country at once, and the idea of a carrier whose entire franchise is 88 rural service areas is a product of American spectrum licensing rather than anything technical. I read about this market. I was never in it.

~ midnight pacific ~

Alltel, out of Little Rock, signed the merger agreement on 9 January 2005 and valued the deal at about $6 billion including assumed debt. Western Wireless shareholders voted it through on 29 July. Alltel's own filing with the SEC records the rest precisely: the merger was effective at 12:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on 1 August 2005, the company was merged into a subsidiary that had been incorporated under the name Wigeon Acquisition LLC, and the consideration was 54.3 million Alltel shares plus $933.4 million in cash. The deregistration form was filed the following day.

There was also a second company inside the first one. Western Wireless International held licenses in seven countries and about 1.8 million subscribers, Ireland and Austria among them. Alltel had no interest in running a wireless operator in Europe and sold those assets off after the merger closed, which means the international business survived its parent and the domestic one simply became Alltel, then Verizon, then whatever the towers answer to now.

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