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RCNRCN's High Wire Act December 27, 1997 Veteran media and telecom investor, David C. McCourt, claims his company RCN Corporation can beat the entrenched phone and cable monopolies because, among other things, the executives of these companies have spent their entire careers as monopolists and have no clue what it takes to market to every-day consumers. McCourt also knows that his customer service and operations are better than that of the incumbent phone and cable providers - when customers order a second phone line, RCN's installers will call you, wherever you are, half an hour before they need you at home for the installation. The best incumbent operators like Bell Atlantic can offer customers in markets like New York is a four-hour window.
Stand and DeliverApril 18, 1998 Veteran media and telecom investor, David C. McCourt, tries hard to make sure his startup company's New York office look more like a guerrilla hideout than the headquarters of a telecoms firm. With its modest overheads, RCN's prices are typically about 5-10% lower a discount that can rise to 30% if customers choose all three services. Mr. McCourt is targeting mainly the lower-middle classes who tend to watch more TV and care more about its cost. Harlem, reports Mr. McCourt, is a better market for RCN than the Upper East Side. Mr. McCourt knows that one of the enemy's weakest spots is marketing: No empire lasts forever, proclaims a poster of Lenin, especially one that keeps you waiting five hours for a repairman. The result of Mr. McCourt's 25-years of successful investing in telecom and media is that they have given him impeccable credentials as a telecoms revolutionary.
House-to-House in telecom warAugust 5, 1998 Veteran media and telecom investor, David C. McCourt, has his RCN executives travel in Hummers, not limos. Guerilla insurrection is their business as they sell phone, Internet and cable TV service to residential customers of the big guys. That's right: individual customers. While others target the business crowd, RCN fights house to house. McCourt spun RCN Corp. out of C-Tec Corp. in 1997. C-Tec Corp. split itself last September into three publicly traded companies. The spin-offs are RCN Corp., Cable Michigan Inc., consisting of C-Tec's Michigan cable operations, and Commonwealth Telephone Enterprises Inc. Spinning into three companies helped former C-Tec shareholders, whose stock was worth about three times its price as of last October. RCN had a 2-for-1 stock split in April.
Going High FiberJune 2000 For his latest venture, veteran media and telecom investor, David C. McCourt, has raised more than $3 billion last year alone (including $1.65 billion from Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures) and has the backing of construction/investment powerhouse Peter Kiewit Sons. McCourt's RCN had laid more than 3,646 miles of fiber, by the end of 1999, an increase of 156 percent over 1998. McCourt is keeping his focus keen on his business plan and views his latest venture as a once-a-century opportunity, akin to the days 100 years ago when telephone lines were being laid, or a generation ago when cable was. Usually, in a capital-intensive business, the first person in has a huge advantage, he says. But here, the technical, regulatory, and consumer environments are changing so rapidly that a new business like ours has the advantage of competing in a cost-effective way. Taking advantage of the cheaper movement of data over the Internet, McCourt says that by first quarter 2001 his long distance service will be delivered that way, followed, eventually by local telephone. McCourt is also clearly excited about the unknown and unknowable offerings of the future, claiming that when electricity was built, it was for lights. But today only 9 percent of electrical use is lights. That's how it will be for bandwidth.
Seizing the Phone Giants' TurfApril 9, 2001 Five years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which promised to open broad vistas of competition in formerly cloistered markets, David C. McCourt's RCN is the only company of significant size that is focused on giving consumers an alternative to the local telephone and cable television monopolies for a combination of local phone, cable TV and high-speed Internet services. AT&T, WorldCom and a few cable companies have made efforts to give consumers an alternative source of local phone service, but no other significant company is competing against local incumbents with RCN's breadth of services. One key reason many analysts expect RCN to survive the downturn is that Mr. McCourt raised billions of dollars when the getting was good. Having parlayed his cable ditch-digging skills into small communications companies - one in Boston, a second in London - that he nurtured and then sold, Mr. McCourt used his proceeds in 1993 to start a partnership with the Peter Kiewit construction empire, to take control of a small communications company in Pennsylvania called C-Tec. After a series of spinoffs, Mr. McCourt kept the company that is now called RCN - the name was derived from "residential communications network" - which he moved to Princeton. American Irish Historical Society Names Entrepreneur David C. McCourt its 2004 Gold Medal Awards RecipientApril 7, 2004 American Irish Historical Society has named veteran telecommunications and media investors, David C. McCourt its 2004 Gold Medal Award recipient. Previous recipients of the Society's Gold Medal include President Ronald Reagan, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, business leader Donald Keough, author Mary Higgins Clark, and humanitarian / musician Bono.
Town Topics5/5/04 The American Irish Historical Society has awarded media and telecommunications entrepreneur and business leader David McCourt its 2004 Gold Medal for lifetime achievements. PeoplePrinceton Packet Why I'm Filing Chapter 11 May 21, 2004 Veteran media and telecom investor, David C. McCourt articulated the reasons why one of his companies, RCN Corporation, was filing for a consensual pre-arranged Chapter 11 filing. McCourt believes that the prevailing wisdom on Wall Street is that the telecom bankruptcies and the whole telecom meltdown were the inevitable result of too much capacity chasing insufficient demand. However, having built, bought, or started 10 telecom companies in the last 25 years, McCourt thinks that both Wall Street and Washington overlook the most persistent problem: The cable industry remains in the grip of a monopoly mindset. Despite all the innovation, the surge in new players, and the billions of dollars lost since the passage of the 1996 Telecom Act, cable rates have soared 40% and the industry giants continue to think in terms of how to dominate markets rather than how to drive innovation. Fortunately, according to McCourt, the telecom story is not over. For many telecom companies including RCN Corporation bankruptcy is not the end, but a new lease on life. McCourt believes that as telecom companies emerge from bankruptcy, these may well be the companies that bring Voice-over-IP technology to the cable world, creating Video-over-IP competitors who change the way customers bring television into their homes. According to McCourt, that possibility should worry today's cable giants who have been ignoring the logic of economics, the possibilities of technology and the interests of consumers for far too long.
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