Seizing the Phone Giants' Turf

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.

The New York Times

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