While there may be a lack of visual similarities, John Stanton’s career in the wireless industry has nearly mirrored John Travolta’s stardom in Hollywood. Both came out of nowhere at an early age to make an enormous impact-Travolta with “Saturday Night Fever” in the late ’70s and Stanton with McCaw Cellular in the early ’80s-only to find their lights dimming by the early ’90s as they became smaller players in their respective professions. But just as most were ready to write them off, both men found a second wind that not only lifted them back to pinnacles of their chosen careers, but managed to do it by young-enough ages that they would have plenty of time to enjoy it.Similar to an actor trying out for his first starring role, Stanton’s first foray into the wireless business was not without its challenges. Even with an MBA from Harvard Business School, a business card from consulting firm Ernst & Whinney and a set of binders highlighting the potential for cellular communications, it took the 26-year-old Stanton numerous visits before he finally landed a position with eccentric cable executive Craig McCaw’s burgeoning wireless business, which until that time was made up of a small selection of paging operations.
Once an employee at what became McCaw Cellular, Stanton quickly set about building the company’s spectrum portfolio through the government’s original spectrum allocation plan, which split a pair of licenses in the nation’s top markets between the incumbent wireline provider and what was known as a nonwireline company. Stanton was instrumental in forming a number of early partnerships between nonwireline license holders as they attempted to battle incumbent telecom providers.
Stanton credited some of his early successes at McCaw Cellular to the company’s ability to grasp what cellular communications could become from a different perspective than the established Bell players.
“I had a passionate view, and frankly Craig McCaw had a passionate view, that wireless could represent an enormous opportunity,” Stanton said. “To be blunt, I was probably too dumb to realize what we couldn’t do. We had a sense of endless possibilities and enormous opportunities, and we just jumped on it.”
By 1985, Stanton had moved to vice president and chief operating officer at McCaw Cellular, and during the next three years, leveraged McCaw’s cable operations and creative financing to acquire more than 100 license holders to expand McCaw Cellular’s reach, increasing its revenues to more than $100 million per year. Between 1988 and 1991, Stanton was appointed vice chairman and director at McCaw Cellular as well as named director of LIN Broadcasting, which McCaw purchased in 1989, and provided the company with a near-nationwide footprint and title as the largest wireless carrier in the country.
“From my perspective Craig McCaw is the godfather of the wireless industry, and John worked for Craig for a long time, and I think it was a great combination,” said Tim Donahue, president and chief executive officer of Nextel Communications Inc., who added he was hired by Stanton to head McCaw’s paging division in 1986. “John at a very early age had a lot of responsibility and helped Craig build McCaw Cellular.”
While Stanton was still an employee of McCaw Cellular, he said he could see that McCaw was planning to exit the wireless business eventually, and the time was right to take advantage of pricing opportunities available in acquiring rural cellular licenses. Stanton began to spread his wings beyond McCaw as early as 1988, when along with wife, Theresa Gillespie, he formed Stanton Communications with the intent of investing in a variety of communications-related businesses.
Since most major markets already were being served by established wireless operators, Stanton began to look more closely at the potential of serving rural markets, which to that time were not considered populated enough to justify aggressive network expansion.
“I originally went to Craig in ’89 with the notion of buying rural properties at McCaw, because I was a director and an officer at McCaw and had that responsibility,” Stanton explained. “McCaw didn’t have the balance sheet at the time to pursue it because we had just bought and were in the middle of buying LIN Broadcasting. So he said, `Go do it on your own,’ and so we did.”
Despite his leadership positions and history with McCaw Cellular, Stanton embarked on building his own wireless house.
“John had accomplished so much at McCaw and there loomed the opportunity for him to start his own gig, and he went for it,” said John Chapple, former McCaw executive and current president and CEO of Nextel Partners Inc.
Stanton’s “gig” eventually became Pacific Northwest Cellular, which he founded in 1992 and quickly became the nation’s eighth-largest cellular company. Stanton then acquired a controlling interest in General Cellular Corp., which merged with Pacific Northwest in 1994 to form Western Wireless Corp.
While Stanton’s moves were overshadowed by AT&T Corp.’s $11.5 billion-plus debt acquisition of McCaw Cellular, he was quietly making plans to leverage his growing rural operations to establish himself as one of the leading players in the wireless space.
In 1994, Stanton formed Western PCS to bid in the FCC’s PCS license auction. In 1995, Western acquired PCS licenses in a handful of top markets in the western United States. By 1996, Stanton used proceeds from a $600 million-plus initial public offering of Western Wireless stock to fund additional PCS license acquisitions in the West and Midwest and renamed his PCS venture VoiceStream Wireless Corp.
Unlike most wireless carriers, which were using either TDMA or CDMA technology for their network deployments, Stanton decided to go with the European-based GSM standard for VoiceStream’s network, taking advantage of both price and technology advances made by carriers around the world and becoming one of the few U.S. carriers that allowed international roaming.
Stanton continued to grow VoiceStream’s footprint throughout the late ’90s through acquisitions that rivaled anything he had accomplished at McCaw. Omnipoint Communications was acquired in 1999 for more than $2 billion, providing VoiceStream with a number of top East Coast markets, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Boston and Detroit. The Omnipoint acquisition was followed by a more than $3 billion acquisition of Aerial Communications, which further expanded VoiceStream’s nationwide presence to include major Midwest markets, including Minneapolis, Houston and Pittsburgh.
By the end of 1999, VoiceStream was spun off from Western Wireless, served more than 845,000 subscribers and was available in 23 of the country’s top 25 markets.
The 21st century proved to be even more adventurous for Stanton as he announced plans to acquire PowerTel Inc. in early 2000, only to top the deal by announcing Voice-Stream had agreed to be acquired by German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom AG in a deal originally valued at more than $50 billion. Following more than a year of government wrangling over foreign-ownership concerns and the effects of a sagging stock market, DT finally acquired VoiceStream in 2001 for more than $30 billion, and eventually renamed the carrier T-Mobile USA Inc. in line with DT’s international wireless operations.
Following the acquisition, Stanton took a step back from T-Mobile USA; the company appointed Robert Dotson CEO and Stanton maintained the chairman title. In addition to allowing Stanton some time to catch his breath, it also provided him with more time to spend on Western Wireless, which continued to capitalize on the growth of wireless, serving more than 1 million subscribers in rural markets and becoming a major roaming provider for most of the nation’s largest operators.
And like an actor thanking all of his supporters when accepting an award, the 48-year-old Stanton admits his 20-plus years in the wireless industry have been no one-man show
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“We had the right people who came through at the right time,” Stanton said. “It was just an extraordinary opportunity at both McCaw and in the last 10 years. It would not have happened if there would not have been the right group of people there, so whatever recognition I get, which I do appreciate, really goes to all the people I worked with.”
