To the Editor:
Last week, in a letter to the editor, a former employee of Pocket Communications blamed me for Pocket’s demise. Well, he’s right!
Pocket neither qualified nor deserved to be a C-block licensee. And if the FCC had done its job, there would have been no Pocket to begin with.
Pocket’s short-form application was determined by the FCC to be “incomplete or invalid” because important ownership and financial information was missing. This should have disqualified Pocket from the auction before it even began. Only high-level 11th hour lobbying at the FCC saved Pocket.
Although Pocket certified to the FCC that it was a woman and minority-controlled company, the biggest open secret in the personal communications services industry is that Mr. Daniel Riker exerted de facto control over Pocket-and the last time I checked he was neither a woman nor a minority.
Although the Adarand case killed off the minority preferences, it galled me that Pocket called itself a “minority” company when true minority entrepreneurs (such as myself) were struggling just to stay alive in the C block after Adarand. As a result of this deception, and because Pocket was the second-largest winner in the C block, the American people have been misled to believe that “minorities” won more than a third of the C-block licenses.
Pocket also violated the foreign ownership rules and publicly admitted as much when it stated that the reason Pocket filed for bankruptcy was to prevent its foreign investors from taking control of the licenses. It is illegal (even under the new WTO regime) for aliens to exert “control” over an FCC license without FCC approval.
If the FCC had put Pocket through the same lengthy and detailed factual inquiry that NextWave was forced to endure, I guarantee you that Pocket never would have received its licenses.
My company, NatTel, used a financing firm to raise money for us to acquire licenses in the Pacific Rim. We provided this firm with our business plan, information regarding which markets we wanted and how much we were willing to pay for those markets. We later discovered that this same firm, unbeknownst to us at the time, was simultaneously working for Pocket and actually became a stockholder in Pocket during the auction.
After providing our business plan to this firm, we never heard from them again. However, in the auction’s final days, Pocket began bidding on all of the Pacific Rim markets targeted in our business plan. Pocket even attempted to outbid NatTel in American Samoa in the last rounds. After spending the entire auction focusing on major Midwest markets such as Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and Detroit, why would Pocket suddenly bid on American Samoa?
We later found the answer. Our financing firm provided our business plan to Pocket, in which the firm was a stockholder, and convinced the investors previously targeted to invest in NatTel to switch their investments to Pocket instead. As a result of this skullduggery, NatTel sued Pocket right before the Easter weekend last year. That following Monday, Pocket filed for bankruptcy. NatTel also filed a petition at the FCC to deny all of Pocket’s licenses, which is still pending.
Pocket now is in liquidation and has dismissed all of its employees. It plans to sell off some of its licenses and return the rest to the FCC for reauction. The result is that there will be no more Pocket. To this I say, good riddance.
Pocket violated numerous FCC rules and other laws virtually at every turn. The company was an illegality from its inception. Pocket will soon be nothing more than a lamentable C-block memory. We want to know its name no more.
Jack E. Robinson, president
National Telecom PCS Inc.
Stamford, Conn.
