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      WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 1994
DEC 5 (NB) -- Somewhere, in a secret
location in Kansas City, Mo,
executives from "The Wireless Co." --
the alliance of Sprint, Tele-
Communications Inc., Comcast and Cos
Communications -- are huddled in a
sealed war room, submitting bids to
the Federal Communications Commission
over encrypted phone lines.

    In Washington, the FCC has built
its own war room in the basement of a
Postal Service building near the
Capitol, with 20 bidding booths, each
containing a computer that the FCC
can monitor electronically and a
printer. In a separate room, locked
to keep out the public, 10 FCC
telemarketers are taking bids over
the phones.

    A total of 23  of the 30 bidders
are taking advantage of the FCC's
opportunity to bid remotely.

    The FCC's high-stakes auction of
99 radio spectrum licenses for
personal communications services is
underway. Estimates from the proceeds
of the sale range from $3 billion to
$30 billion, reflecting the
uncertainty of analysts in predicting
how much the companies and alliances
are willing to pay for the new
generation of wireless communications
technology. Some believe tiny phones
that follow us everywhere will be a
novelty. Others are sure they will
displace conventional telephones.

    "The economic stakes involved in
this spectrum auction will make the
Oklahoma land rush look like a bake
sale," said attorney Nicholas Allard
of the Washington, D.C. office of
Latham & Watkins and an expert in
telecommunications law.

    Bidders made refundable "earnest
money" deposits of up to  $118
million. That sum was put up by the
Sprint alliance, which wants to enter
39 markets. Pacific Telesis ponied up
$56 million for its place at the
auction table.

    No winners will be immediately
obvious, as the bidding could last
two to three months. Companies will
be allowed to bid for multiple
licenses simultaneously and shift
bids from location to location. Each
bidder's moves will be electronically
posted, so FCC staffers expect a lot
of tactical bidding including feints
and ripostes.

    "This auction represents the
largest, one-time launching of a
startup industry in America's
peacetime history," said Reed Hundt,
FCC chairman. "We don't want to focus
on getting every last nickel. What we
want is to focus on a technique that
gets people to show the color of
their money as quickly and
continuously as possible."

    Bidders must increased new bids
by at least five percent and must bid
on at least some licenses in every
round to stay in the hunt. The
commission is holding only one or two
rounds of bidding each day to give
bidders time to evaluate bids by
their rivals.

    According to Evan Kwerel, the FCC
economist who proposed simultaneous
bidding, a conventional auction would
not have worked well for the PCS
licenses, because the value of each
license is interdependent on the
value of the other licenses.
Companies seeking to assemble a
package of licenses that will
constitute a national wireless
network will be bidding with specific
connections of licenses in mind.

    (Kennedy Maize/19941205/Press
Contacts: Susan Lewis Sallet, 202-
418-0500; Nicholas Allard, 202-637-
2200)

    Editorial -- MCI And The Future
Of The Internet 12/02/94 WASHINGTON,
D.C., U.S.A., 1994 DEC 2 (NB) -- By
Kennedy Maize. I have seen the future
of the Internet and its name is MCI.
The Washington-based long-distance
carrier recently gave reporters a
tour of its new Net offering,
including the online shopping mall it
plans to begin rolling out in
January. As one MCI executive told
Newsbytes, "We are going into
cyberspace commercial real estate."

    For most of its brief, 25-year
history, the Internet has been a
government project. Access has been
free, which is to say, subsidized by
the taxpayers through Defense
Department and National Science
Foundation appropriations. Populated
mostly by academics and students, the
Net has been a free-form, chaotic,
sophomoric, but incredibly powerful
new way of communicating. But the
future of the Internet is in
commerce, which the federal
government recognized some time ago.
And, based on what I saw in MCI's
plush conference room this week, MCI
has a major head start in the race to
commercialize it.

    "MCI is making the Internet as
easy to use, as accessible and as
critical to businesses as today's
global phone network," says Timothy
Price, recently elevated to executive
vice president of MCI.

    MCI brings some major assets to
the table as it tries to turn the
Internet into a routine business tool
and a new way of shopping for the
average consumer. As an aside, 80
percent of catalog shoppers are
women, which means MCI will have to
make its Internet shopping attractive
to women.

    The biggest head start MCI has on
the new Internet is its existing
presence on the net. NSFnet is
essentially MCI. MCI's high-speed,
digital data network currently
handles 40 percent of all US domestic
Internet traffic.

    With its long-distance capability
available to virtually any American
with a phone, and its Internet
backbone, MCI can easily offer access
to the net from dialup to ISDN to,
eventually, ATM. More important, MCI
seems to have the human resources
necessary to transform the Net into a
well-behaved service. It starts with
Vint Cerf, rightly called "father of
the Internet." Cerf, at Stanford, and
Robert Kahn at DOD, developed the
TCP/IP (transmission control
protocol/Internet protocol) that is
at the heart of the network of
networks.

    Cerf provides the "vision thing"
for MCI's Internet ventures. Cerf has
also assembled an impressive team and
forged important significant
alliances, especially with Netscape
Communications, the new software firm
Jim Clark put together after leaving
Silicon Graphics. Clark basically
hired the entire programming team
that developed Mosaic, the World Wide
Web browser, and turned them loose on
making it a commercial product. "I
was blown away by Mosaic," Clark told
reporters, "by its potential to
enable commerce and enable anybody to
be on the net."

    Realizing that security was a key
to commerce on the Net, Clark turned
to RSA to integrate its encryption
technology into Netscape for MCI
Internet users. Shoppers at MCI's
virtual shopping mall will be able to
make purchases with the knowledge
that their credit card data is
inviolable.

    MCI also turned to FTP Software
to provide the TCP/IP software that
will be the foundation for the
Netscape application. That means
users won't have to fret over TCP/IP
issues, but can simply surf the net
painlessly. (MCI's demonstration of
its virtual mall included a stop at
Vint's Surf Shop, complete with a
picture of the bearded Cerf on the
beach in a Hawaiian shirt, to pick up
some boards and routers.)

    The shopping mall is also a
brilliant idea. MCI will essentially
rent cyber floor space to businesses
that will offer goods and services
online. This allows a business to get
on the Net and into a Web site
without the need to create a full-
fledged WWW interface. MCI takes care
of that.

    The evolution of the Internet has
been fascinating, especially the
emergence of the WWW, invented at
CERN, the European high energy
physics lab. In 1992, according to
Cerf, Web traffic was in 127th place
in terms of traffic on the NSFnet
backbone. By last year, he added, Web
traffic had risen to 11th place and
today, Web traffic consumes 10
percent of the capacity of the
backbone. Mosaic's graphical
interface is responsible for that
phenomenal growth.

    Now, MCI and Netscape are taming
the interface and the Internet. When
MCI's $49.95 package goes up for sale
in January, I'll be one of the first
in line to buy it.

    (Kennedy Maize/19941123)

    Priority's "One Number Service"
For Paging/Phone/Fax 11/23/94
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A.,
1994 NOV 23 (NB) -- The National
Dispatch Center's One Connect and
Arch Nationwide's paging services
have starting to use a new "service
provider version" of Priority Call
Management's MSX System for supplying
integrated cellular, paging, fax, and
phone "one number service" to
individual end-users and businesses.

    At a meeting with Newsbytes in
Camb