Bill Morrow is a veteran of the mobile world. He led
Vodaphone’s European operations and was only the second foreigner to be CEO of
a listed Japanese company when he took over Japan Telecom. Now, as CEO of
Kirkland-based Clearwire, a company 51 percent owned by Sprint, he is racing to
build a national fourth-generation wireless broadband network to take advantage
of exploding demand for broadband mobile internet access. Network access will
be sold as Clearwire’s own “Clear” brand as well as through partners Sprint,
Comcast and Time Warner.
First job: My father passed away when I was very young, so
we didn’t have very much money. My first 40-hour-a-week job was at age 12. I
worked for the school district where I did everything from cleaning classrooms
and mowing the lawns to trimming the hedges and painting the buildings. I did
that every summer until I was 15. I remember that with my first check I gave
half to my mother and with the other half, put a down payment on a stereo.
First telecom job: After leaving the U.S. Navy, I went to
school to study electrical engineering. I was also collecting unemployment, but
they told me that to get benefits I had to interview for a job. AT&T
offered me a job installing telephones, climbing telephone poles and doing
maintenance work. I started at age 21. At 23, when they promoted me, they said
I was their youngest promotion ever. I was put in charge of linemen in their
50s. They were tough, gruff guys who called me “whippersnapper.” I quickly
learned that you work for the people work for you. I asked them, “What can I do to remove roadblocks?” I
eventually won them over.
Work overseas: I went
to Japan in 1995 to work for a small [mobile] company with just 300
employees. We were a startup going against a huge incumbent, NTT. Nobody
thought we would succeed. It’s a very similar story to Clearwire. We were
challenging the established behemoths with a new technology. We were saying we
don’t care what anybody else thinks, we believe in our product.
As president of Pacific Gas & Electric: My wife’s mother
was dying and we needed to be in California. At PG&E I was going to modernize
the plant, automate things, promote conservation. This appealed to my core
values and experience. I went in there and realized it was more state-run than
I was used to.
Challenges at Clearwire: It’s the sheer volume of work. Last
year, we built a network [available to] 34 million people. We went from 2,000
to 3,400 employees. This year, we are going to expand to cover 120 million
people. This is unprecedented. To grow that fast, you have to have systems that
can grow in scale. That’s why we moved to Amdocs [software] to provide billing
systems. That’s why we decided to go with the first and second best contractors
[to build cell towers].
The broadband advantage: The limitations of today’s 3G technology are clear.
Many people using iPhones are frustrated with the network. It’s not AT&T’s
fault. The technology and spectrum position is insufficient to respond to the
demand. That’s why Verizon [and AT&T] are moving to LTE [a
fourth-generation wireless standard]. We probably have a good one-year jump [on
Verizon and AT&T]. By the time we get this thing really moving, I won’t
care. Competition is healthy.
The new strategy: Our fourth-generation technology [WiMax]
will change the landscape. If you consider broadband in your house, you have a
cable modem, an Xbox and a variety of desktop or laptop PCs that all use the
internet over Wi-Fi. The cable company doesn’t really care how many devices you
connect. So imagine you can do the same thing across the country. You might
have a digital camera or a video camera that downloads data directly to a
central server to update your Facebook. There are going to be more devices
connected to mobile broadband than you can even imagine. Sony CEO Howard
Stringer says that 90 percent of Sony’s products will have some form of
connectivity to the internet by the end of next year. Look at the iPad or the
Kindle. Applications on the internet have driven people to have very different
lifestyles from what they had just 10 years ago.
Return on investment: We will have a lower cost structure
than anything else available today. Because it’s a scale business, we can
spread our costs over more customers or, let’s say, bytes. Our cost per byte
will be fundamentally cheaper than anybody else’s because we have so much more
spectrum sharing a common network. Today, our average customer uses about 7.5
gigabytes per month [more than five times what 3G customers use].
Smartphones: Although the primary application for our
customers today is mobile computing, we’ll see some smartphones introduced
later this year that are designed to work on the Clearwire network. If you take
something like an iPhone and put it on the Clearwire network, it will work
eight times faster.
In Seattle: We have 500 full-time employees, 1,500 if you
include contractors. I’ve had the benefit of living all around the world and
recruiting in many places. Location does matter. What I am encouraged by is
that this area has a highly educated workforce available and the community is
very supportive.
The future of Wimax: We are technology-agnostic. If LTE
offers something equal to or better than WiMax, then all we have to do is add
some equipment and software to run both systems. We have it all planned.