(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Craig McCaw avoided the spotlight at his own 50th birthday party. Guests visiting McCaw's 780-acre (316-hectare) James Island near Vancouver for the occasion celebrated amid a Hollywood-style set modeled on his hometown of Centralia, Washington.

As vintage cars, a high school band and baton twirlers on horseback paraded by, two clowns followed, picking up the horse manure. One, grinning beneath face paint, was McCaw, who put together the first U.S.-wide cellular telephone network and sold it to AT&T Corp. for $11.5 billion in 1994.

``Boy, he got a big laugh,'' says Mick Deal, 55, a classmate at Seattle's Lakeside School in the 1960s who attended the August 1999 bash.

After flops early this decade with satellite networks and local telephone service, McCaw is shaking off his failures and taking another stab at telecommunications. He's backing a new venture to bring wireless Internet service to homes, stockpiling licenses in the U.S. and Europe so he can assemble a worldwide network before rivals can match his reach.

He recognizes the perils of wading back into the fray.

``It has been said, especially over the last few years, that only those with masochistic tendencies would compete in telecom,'' McCaw, 55, said in October during his first appearance in at least a decade before the Washington-based Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, the biggest wireless industry group. ``Apparently, I continue to have that masochistic tendency.''

Returning to Wireless

McCaw is returning to the wireless world where he made his fortune. In 2003, he bought Clearwire Corp., an Arlington, Texas- based company that provides Internet service via airwaves once reserved for instructional television. Last year, McCaw's Clearwire raised $160 million and bought licenses to deliver broadband access to computer users in 58 cities from Atlanta to North Platte, Nebraska.

The additions supplement licenses for more than 30 cities that Clearwire had assembled before it ran out of money, says Jim Wiesenberg, a radio-spectrum investor and consultant with WW Associates in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In June, Clearwire paid 1.6 million Danish kroner ($284,568) for one of three wireless Internet licenses covering Copenhagen, according to the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In October, it bought Net2Cell, an Irish startup with licenses for 18 cities including Dublin, Galway, Kilkenny and Wexford, according to Corporate Finance Ireland Ltd., a Dublin-based investment bank that handled the transaction. The price wasn't disclosed.

Asia, South America

In Belgium, Clearwire is test-marketing a service in central Brussels. It's also scouting for licenses in Asia and South America, executives say.

McCaw's plan to pump out e-mail, movies and phone calls via radio waves pits him against big U.S. communications providers and their competing technologies.

Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, has 7 million cable modem customers. New York-based Verizon Communications Inc., the biggest U.S. local phone company, sells Internet connections via high-speed digital subscriber lines to 3.6 million households.

A one-time McCaw ally spots the potential, too. Nextel Communications Inc., the mobile-phone company the McCaw family helped turn around with a $1.1 billion investment before selling its controlling stake in 2003, is snapping up licenses on the same frequency as Clearwire.

Grudge Match

McCaw's latest pursuit reprises an old grudge match. During the 1960s, McCaw's father, Elroy, railed against the six-foot (1.8-meter) telephone cords that plugged into a wall and tethered callers to AT&T's phones, McCaw recounted during a March 2004 Boston College panel discussion on ``Wealth and Work in the 21st Century.''

Elroy McCaw died from a stroke at age 57 in 1969. Craig, a 19-year-old Stanford University sophomore, took charge at the nationwide radio, television and cable network his father had built. Since then, many of McCaw's ventures -- among them mobile- phone service provider McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. and satellite communications company Teledesic LLC -- have aimed to unseat fixed-line telephone and cable companies.

``One thing Craig always said: `Flexibility is heaven,''' recalls Robert Ratliffe, a former senior vice president at McCaw Cellular. At that company, McCaw, a licensed pilot and America's Cup challenger, often checked in at the office from a mountain retreat or a yachting trip, Ratliffe says. McCaw declined to comment for this article.

Active Role

As chief executive officer of Clearwire, McCaw is taking his most active role since his investment company, Eagle River Investments LLC, began prospecting in telecom a decade ago.

``He's never worked harder or been more passionate about something in quite a long time,'' says Dixon Doll, co-founder and managing general partner of Menlo Park, California-based DCM-Doll Capital Management, which holds a stake in Clearwire.

A dyslexic and an introvert, McCaw has always disliked paperwork and meetings, Ratliffe says. He never attended board sessions of his local phone company, XO Communications Inc., which filed for bankruptcy in 2002, former executives say.

People who bump into McCaw often don't recognize him -- and he doesn't bother to fill them in. As he shopped for boating supplies one day at West Marine near Lake Union in Seattle, the clerk couldn't believe her customer wearing a $25 Casio watch was a billionaire. She told him, ```That's a pretty famous name around here,''' Ratliffe recalls. McCaw just grinned.

`Hands on the Wheel'

At Clearwire, McCaw interviewed almost every employee at the company's new headquarters in Kirkland, Washington, a Seattle suburb on Lake Washington that's also home to Eagle River. He has visited regional offices in the four U.S. cities where Clearwire currently provides service: Jacksonville and Daytona Beach, Florida; St. Cloud, Minnesota; and Abilene, Texas, says Gerard Salemme, a Clearwire vice president.

Last year, McCaw led a half dozen meetings to design Clearwire's logo, pushing for warm images of people, Salemme says. Stylized faces of happy customers linked to the slogan ``Others Connect Wires. We Connect People'' was the result.

On Aug. 27, when Clearwire started service in Jacksonville, McCaw conducted the teleconference congratulating the team. ``He tried a business model that was more like private equity,'' Ratliffe says, referring to earlier ventures in which McCaw kept his distance from managers and employees. ``He decided it would be more fun to have his hands on the wheel.''

Spotty Record

For all of McCaw's enthusiasm about Clearwire, his record with telecom investments is spotty. He scored with Nextel, whose shares soared to $79.81 in 2000 from $4.81 in 1995 before sliding. Other forays flopped. McCaw's stake in XO Communications peaked at $5.3 billion in 2000 and then evaporated when the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002.

Later that year, McCaw shuttered Teledesic. The company had raised $1 billion from investors, including Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who supported McCaw's vision of an 800-satellite network to blanket the globe with phone and Internet service. Teledesic never launched a single satellite.

McCaw's failures expose lapses in his strategy of using others to finance his businesses and sustaining losses to expand quickly, says David Montanaro, who joined Teledesic from Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola Inc. in 1994.

McCaw Cellular lost money in four of five years before AT&T bought it. Teledesic bought out shareholders for $2.35 a share, a fraction of the $20 peak.

`Lousy Manager'

``Craig is a lousy manager,'' says Montanaro, a Teledesic shareholder and lead plaintiff in a breach-of-duty lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court in Washington in 2001. The suit charged that McCaw had diverted $200 million of Teledesic's cash to help Eagle River buy another satellite company, London-based ICO Global Communications Ltd.

Teledesic loaned ICO two-thirds of Teledesic's cash to help close a merger of the companies that was later abandoned. A special committee that Teledesic appointed after Montanaro's suit was filed found the loan had failed the test of ``fair procedure'' under Delaware law because there was no independent review.

In 2002, McCaw agreed to pay Teledesic $217.5 million, including interest. The suit was dismissed with no damages awarded. ICO has yet to start commercial service after Eagle River sank $510.7 million into the venture. ``He's good at creating hype, building a buzz and then selling it off,'' Montanaro says. Clearwire spokesman Todd Wolfenbarger says McCaw declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Bubble Bursts

The bursting of the telecom bubble in 2000 highlighted the industry's perils. At least five dozen publicly traded telecommunications carriers have declared bankruptcy since that year, according to Web site BankruptcyData.com. WorldCom Inc. filed the largest Chapter 11 plan in U.S. history.

If completed, SBC Communications Inc.'s January agreement to buy AT&T for about $16 billion would mark the end of the 130-year- old icon that brought phone service into American homes.

With Clearwire, McCaw is banking on the much-delayed convergence of the telephone, the television and the computer. The quest has stymied companies from Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, to Tokyo-based Sony Corp., which has spent $2 billion on what it calls a home server due in 2006 or 2007.

For all of the effort, analysts such as Steven Milunovich at New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co. say consumers may not want one device for communications, entertainment and work.

Broadband at Home

In his October speech at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, McCaw described a home where people can watch TV, download movies, conduct videoconferences and get phone service on their computers through the same broadband pipe.

Those who discount the demand should think back to when Alaskan villagers got television in the 1970s and started watching the cop show ``Starsky and Hutch,'' he told the conference.

``It just blew their minds to see the living standards of other Americans,'' said McCaw, who often compares business to anthropology and has told friends that his dyslexia helps him see connections that others might miss. If broadband is cheap enough, there's no end to what people will do with it, McCaw said.

Clearwire can reach about 200,000 U.S. homes. Customers lease a 6-by-9-inch (15-by-23-centimeter) modem about an inch thick that plugs into their desktop or laptop PC. The modem receives radio signals from a microwave oven-size base station on existing cellular towers in their neighborhoods.

$34.95 a Month

Download speeds average 1.5 million bits per second, comparable to cable lines and enough to watch video or listen to music. Customers pay $34.95 a month, plus $3 to lease the modem. Options such as voice service can be added later.

Today, a third of U.S. homes with Internet connections have broadband, defined by Fort Worth, Texas-based consulting firm Carter & Burgess Inc. as able to carry video, voice and data simultaneously at a faster speed than copper telephone lines.

Compared with cable or high-speed DSL, wireless broadband is in its infancy. It's available in a few rural markets and often delivered over unlicensed channels vulnerable to interference. About 37,500 homes in the U.S. used wireless broadband last year, according to Boston-based Pyramid Research Inc. Closely held regional companies such as Kearney, Nebraska-based Gryphon Wireless and Middletown, Rhode Island-based TowerStream Corp. are among the main providers. TowerStream has 700 business customers.

Predecessors that tried to create a nationwide wireless data network failed, mainly because costs were too high and obstacles disrupted the signals, says Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research in San Francisco.

Past Failures

In 2001, Metricom Inc., a San Jose, California-based wireless provider funded by investors such as Microsoft co- founder Paul Allen, shut down. Sprint Corp., based in Overland Park, Kansas, pulled its Ion wireless project that same year after spending $2 billion.

McCaw Cellular itself backed a wireless data venture called Project Angel before AT&T acquired McCaw. Rob Mechaley, who is now Clearwire's chief technology officer, led the effort. ``AT&T loaded a lot of unnecessary baggage onto the project and slowed it way down,'' McCaw said in San Francisco.

In 2003, McCaw revisited the technology by taking an undisclosed stake in NextNet Wireless. The Minneapolis-based company was winning customers in Canada and Mexico for a new type of wireless gear that operates on licensed frequencies.

SSI Micro Ltd., located in Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories, became a client, hoping to deliver service where icy tundra and temperatures as low as minus 37 degrees Celsius (minus 99 degrees Fahrenheit) limit fixed lines.

`Black Magic'

When one SSI engineer tested NextNet's modem in his basement apartment beneath a granite cliff in February 2004, he was shocked at the signal strength, says Jeff Philipp, the company's CEO. ``This is black magic,'' he says.

Modems for wireless Internet cost more than those for cable or DSL -- about $250 per customer compared with $70, says Joseph Laszlo, an analyst at Jupiter Communications Inc. in New York. In Clearwire's case, customers lease the modem rather than buy it. The involvement of Intel Corp., the world's biggest computer chip maker, may trim prices.

Intel is designing new semiconductors to make it easier for computers to complete high-speed wireless connections to the Internet. Santa Clara, California-based Intel took what it called a ``significant'' stake in Clearwire in October. That gave Clearwire a role in shaping the Intel standard, called Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, or WiMAX.

Costs Shrink

As operators start using standard equipment, the $250 modem cost will shrink about 15 percent annually, according to the Portland, Oregon-based WiMAX Forum, a group backed by Intel.

If a company such as Clearwire spent $8.1 million over five years, it could deploy 26 WiMAX-enabled base stations to cover 1 million people scattered over 125 square kilometers (48 square miles), the group says.

WiMAX Forum envisions so-called MetroZones, where the Internet is available everywhere, not just in coffee shops or airports.

``Craig's involvement shows that this technology is moving out of the labs and into the world,'' says Sean Maloney, executive vice president of Intel's mobility group.

On Jan. 22, Maloney joined Clearwire's Mechaley at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to show an independent movie called ``Rize.'' It was stored on Intel's servers in Oregon and beamed without glitches via radio waves to the Empire Lodge ski resort in the 12,000-foot Wasatch Mountain Range in Deer Valley.

Sprint, Nextel

McCaw's rivals who missed the wireless phone boom don't plan to make the same mistake with data. Qwest Communications International Inc. and Sprint are testing WiMAX equipment.

Nextel, which plans to merge with Sprint, is evaluating service for 2,000 people in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina using gear by Flarion Technologies, one of at least a dozen NextNet rivals.

In a Feb. 8 filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Sprint and Nextel said they plan a national Wireless Interactive Multimedia Service that would let construction workers send video from a job site or let students download assignments while on a bus.

Oliver Valente, vice president of technology development at Sprint, says the companies have licenses that will let them offer service in 80 of the 100 largest U.S. markets by the end of 2008.

Cellular phone companies are expanding, too. Verizon Wireless says it will be able to reach 150 million people by year's end as it rolls out Broadband Access, a $79.99-a-month plan that delivers speeds as great as 500 kilobits per second to users who plug a wireless card into their laptops.

`PowerPoint Presentation'

``Our service is here today,'' says Bill Stone, vice president of marketing at Verizon Wireless. As for WiMAX, he adds, ``Still very much a PowerPoint presentation.''

Intel's Maloney counters that Broadband Access was designed for voice and can't handle as many applications as WiMAX.

Seated in his office overlooking a marina in Kirkland, Mechaley envisions plenty of business as homes switch from slow dial-up connections to broadband. If it comes to a fight, Clearwire is well placed because of its user-friendliness, he adds.

When customers order, they get the modem by mail a day or two later. They don't have to download special software or wait for a worker to drill holes in their walls for a cable or DSL modem.

`Blessed Customer'

``It took about 45 seconds for me to become a blessed customer,'' says Curtis Weaver, 53, a management consultant who uses Clearwire to tap the Web from his 41-foot yacht moored on the St. John's River near Jacksonville.

Some people in the marina have cable wires snaking along the docks. Weaver says he can take a day sail and stay connected. Through three big hurricanes in Florida last year, Clearwire's signal maintained speeds similar to those of a cable modem, Weaver says.

As McCaw sells Clearwire in small communities, he's returning to his roots. The second of four sons, McCaw took an early interest in his father's businesses. Among them was a cable television operation in Centralia, a logging town southwest of Seattle that was then populated by 8,000 people.

When Craig was 16, Elroy McCaw asked his chief engineer, Royce Hull, to teach his son from the ground up. The young McCaw spent the summer of 1965 selling subscriptions door-to-door and climbing telephone poles to check connections, says Hull, now 76.

`Confront People'

In an interview marking his 1997 induction into the Washington-based Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit group that introduces students to high achievers and named McCaw among them in 1989, he said the experience of selling the expensive service in the blue-collar town stuck with him.

``Maybe my whole attitude toward life comes from being forced, as a relatively shy person, to confront people and ask them to do something,'' he said. ``It's your job to think almost anthropologically about humanity and say, `What would be in their best interest?' And then try to get there first.''

After attending Lakeside School, which counts Microsoft's Gates and Allen among its graduates, McCaw left for Stanford in 1968. He didn't strike buddies in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity as a telecommunications genius in the making.

To other Dekes, as the brothers are known, he was a charming guy who hosted Saturday morning ``fizz'' labs -- named for the gin fizzes he made in his dorm room blender before football games, says Fred Morck, a Deke who is now a family practice lawyer in San Mateo, California.

Porsche Car, Cessna Plane

McCaw drove a Porsche 911S sports car and piloted friends around San Francisco Bay in a Cessna plane, says Jim Quillinan, another Deke. ``He always had a lot of toys,'' says Quillinan, who sees McCaw at Stanford football games. ``But he was generous.'' Morck says McCaw had an old pickup truck that he volunteered when the brothers needed something hauled.

Unknown to all but his closest friends, McCaw was dealing with a family tragedy: His father had died of a stroke while McCaw was home on a school break in August 1969. Craig found the body in the family home. Elroy had run up debts while building his empire, and the family's estate was declared insolvent. Craig's mother, Marion, and her sons spent years reorganizing. McCaw shuttled from Stanford to tend to the family's affairs.

McCaw hinted at the toll in the spring of 1970. ``Do you think they'll let me graduate without a major?'' McCaw, then a sophomore, asked Morck, saying he had completed only 30 of the 90 units expected by then. Morck says he had no idea McCaw's father had died or that Craig was dyslexic.

``I was saying to friends at the time, `I just don't think Craig's that smart,''' Morck recalls with a wry laugh.

History Degree

McCaw graduated with a history degree in 1972. By that time, McCaw had already taken the lead at the cable business in Centralia, Hull says. McCaw attracted customers by eliminating the $80 installation fee. Then he borrowed money to buy more systems. Hull ran day-to-day operations as McCaw acquired licenses for pagers and mobile telephones.

``I thought, well, that's kind of weird, that's not going to go,'' Hull says now.

Wireless technology was just emerging in the early 1980s, when the FCC began awarding the first cellular licenses. McCaw formed a company to go after them. At the time, AT&T predicted there would be about 100,000 customers in the U.S., Mechaley says. McCaw saw a bigger opportunity. In 1983, explaining his strategy to human resources consultant Kerry Larson over a conference room table in Kirkland, McCaw forecast that one day telephone numbers would be associated with people and not homes and businesses, Larson recalls.

Cellular Market

By 1986, McCaw's cable company had more than 400,000 subscribers in 37 states after starting with 4,000. McCaw sold the business that year to go after the nationwide cellular market. McCaw Cellular Communications raised more than $280 million in an initial public offering in 1987, dwarfing the $58.8 million that Microsoft had raised a year earlier and turning then 38-year-old McCaw into a billionaire.

McCaw's next coup came in 1989, when he out-dueled Atlanta- based BellSouth Corp., a regional phone company spawned by AT&T's breakup, for New York-based LIN Broadcasting Corp. McCaw Cellular won LIN's valuable New York cellular licenses with the $3.4 billion purchase, completed in 1990.

McCaw never let the pressure show, recalls Deal, his high school friend, who by then was running a real estate business from the same building as McCaw. Deal says he kept water skis in a photocopying room. When the water was calm, the two would water- ski on Lake Washington, even in the midst of the takeover battle. ``The papers would say things were going against him, and he'd just wink at me,'' Deal says.

Sales, Losses Up

McCaw Cellular's revenues exploded; its profits didn't. From 1988 to 1992, sales rose to $1.7 billion from $310 million, according to the company's 1993 annual report. During the same period, the company lost $737 million.

McCaw debated until the last minute about selling to AT&T, recalls Tom Alberg, a vice president who later worked at Teledesic. At New York's Lowell Hotel the night before the deal was reached in August 1993, McCaw polled 10 of his executives. Some were opposed to the sale, Alberg says. ``There's a little bit of wistfulness,'' he says.

McCaw declined to serve on AT&T's board. ``That shocked some people,'' Alberg says. ``Craig said, `No, I want to be free.'''

McCaw turned to pet projects. He backed Teledesic with about $25 million. Eagle River put about $55 million into NextLink Communications Inc., later renamed XO, which provided phone service to small and medium-size businesses via fiber-optic cables.

`People Laughed'

He invested in Nextel in 1995, a year in which it lost $331 million. He pushed the company to focus on the walkie-talkie capabilities that gave it an edge with business customers. ``People laughed at us at first, and now they're still trying to replicate it,'' McCaw said in San Francisco.

In 1994, McCaw donated $2 million to help return Keiko, the killer whale featured in the movie ``Free Willy,'' to its native waters off Iceland. After divorcing his first wife, Wendy, in 1997, McCaw married Susan Rasinski, 42, an investment banker he met at the AT&T Pebble Beach golf tournament in Monterey, California.

McCaw's brother Bruce joked that Craig had dated two women in his life and married both of them, a friend of the couple says. They have three young children. ``Susan is so socially capable,'' Ratliffe says. ``She has brought Craig out a lot.''

$100 Tip

The family lives in a 12,200-square-foot house once owned by musician Kenny G in Hunts Point, on the shore of Lake Washington, where neighbors include the Gateses. The McCaws hosted President George W. Bush for a re-election fund-raiser. Over the years, McCaw has owned a yacht called Cellular One, a Gulfstream IV jet, a Falcon 50 jet and a Beaver seaplane.

At Saleh al Lago, a restaurant on Green Lake in Seattle, McCaw gave waitress Lisa Anderson her best tip ever in 1998: $100 on a $140 check, Anderson recalls.

The telecommunications bust that began in 2000 hit McCaw hard. Iridium LLC, a satellite venture backed by Motorola, filed for bankruptcy in 1999 when its bulky phones and service costs turned off customers, drying up funding for competitors. McCaw raised his bets, investing in ICO the next year. The company launched one satellite; another failed after liftoff.

ICO has yet to begin commercial service. It has an application before the FCC to use its spectrum for mobile phone service, Salemme says.

XO Bankruptcy

McCaw's use of debt caught up with him at XO. After raising $4 billion in at least 10 bond sales starting in 1994, XO filed for bankruptcy in June 2002, hurting financier Theodore Forstmann in the process. New York-based buyout firm Forstmann Little & Co. wrote off a $1.5 billion investment in XO, the first write-off in its 27-year history. A Forstmann Little spokesman declined to comment.

Starting in late 2001, McCaw began putting some assets on the market, including his 5,000-acre ranch in Carmel, California, and the island where he held his birthday party. He sold his 303- foot yacht Tatoosh to Microsoft's Allen that year for a price that hasn't been disclosed.

Ratliffe, who has acted as a family spokesman, dismisses the idea of a fire sale. He says McCaw has since decided to keep the island, with its Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, six ocean- view cottages and 2,600-foot landing strip.

McCaw dropped in on Peter Driessen, who owns neighboring Sidney Island, two summers ago for advice on developing it. ``He struck me as very modest, pleasant and easy to chat with,'' Driessen says. ``Some people who are successful are loud and overbearing. He's not at all like that.''

Gathering Lieutenants

Late in 2002, McCaw began gathering lieutenants for regular Monday morning meetings. The group included Nick Kauser, former chief technology officer at McCaw Cellular; lawyer Ben Wolff; Mechaley; and Salemme. In Eagle River's offices -- with pale- yellow, overstuffed couches and gilt-framed copies of French Impressionist paintings -- the men debated the future of wireless.

McCaw always liked the idea of Project Angel, the initiative he backed in the 1990s, Mechaley says. ``Craig was very enthusiastic about the notion we could take this thing, this broadband pipe, into the home,'' he says. Now, McCaw wanted to know: Had the technology advanced to do that more cheaply?

Mechaley visited companies in the U.S., the U.K. and France. ``I came back and said, `Yeah, I think we can do what we always wanted to do,''' says Mechaley, who was born in a camp at Garrison Dam in North Dakota, where his civil-engineer father was helping to build the dam for Morrison Knudsen Corp.

Clearwire Purchase

The team zeroed in on NextNet, the company with customers in Canada and Mexico. A few months later, McCaw bought Clearwire. He plays down its prospects. ``We may fail, but we're trying our best to put together something that, as a precursor to WiMAX, can make a difference in the meantime,'' he said in San Francisco.

McCaw's team is working 14- to 16-hour days to set up Clearwire kiosks at malls, lease space for its antennas on cellular towers and hire employees, Wolff says. Alberg, who ran the LIN Broadcasting unit for McCaw, sees comparisons with McCaw Cellular in the way Clearwire can start with rural markets and expand toward nationwide coverage.

Clearwire will be selling its service in 20 U.S. cities by year-end, spokesman Wolfenbarger says.

In San Francisco, McCaw dropped hints that he views wireless as unfinished business. Walking the halls of the conference center on the same day Cingular Wireless LLC paid $47 billion for AT&T Wireless Services Inc., completing the extinction of the company he had built, McCaw joked to one former McCaw Cellular executive, ``I hope you observed a moment of silence.'' In his speech, he said AT&T had blown the opportunities he left it.

With Clearwire, a newly energized McCaw is taking another shot at telecom, resurrecting his wireless dream for the Internet age. As the biggest phone companies race into the fray, McCaw will have to prove that this time around, his vision -- and his technology -- are sound