The threat that Jack Cassidy poses for wireless carriers in Ohio is this: While they're aiming rifles, he's firing off a shotgun. At least that's the way he describes it. And as Clay Pigeon Magazine's Shooting Sportsman of the Year for 2003, he's certainly convincing. But regardless of his analogy, Cassidy's philosophy — that companies offering a range of services will trump those with a single “bullet” — appears thus far to be right on target.

Cassidy was once president of Cincinnati Bell Wireless, when there was such a thing. These days, in line with the shotgun approach, the company reorganized itself around customers: There is a president for business services and one for consumers, and beneath them, wireless, local exchange, long-distance and DSL are treated as products, not divisions of the company. Cassidy was promoted from COO to CEO of Cincinnati Bell in July 2003 amid a flurry of other sweeping transformations. The company had only recently regained its original name after its flashier alter ego, Broadwing Communications, was sold to Corvis, leaving Cinci Bell with $2.75 billion in debt. Board seats have changed, and even as this story goes to press, the company is naming a new CFO. All the while, the telecom industry was drastically changing, too.

“The war is being brought to the local exchange companies by the cable companies,” Cassidy said. “The local exchange company that can [bundle services] is going to create an incredible amount of pressure on those wireless companies who stand alone as a rifle approach vs. a shotgun.”

Of course, everyone in telecom has been talking about the importance of bundling “since Christ wore knickers,” Cassidy said. (Talk to the man for any length of time and you get used to his colorful Midwestern turns of phrase. His direct reports snickered at him in a recent earnings call when he said that radio frequency engineers were once “scarce as hens' teeth,” but they were unfazed when he later compared access line loss to “a pig going through a python.”) But in a world of portable wireless numbers and cable telephony, bundling is no longer enticement; it is entrenchment. In this new season, wireless can be viewed less as a revenue stream and more as a defensive weapon used to protect local exchange and long-distance customer bases from cable and satellite competitors. “[Wireless] is a product that the cable guys can't come with,” Cassidy said.

Wireless subscribers won't necessarily change providers just because number portability allows them to. But LNP will likely exacerbate their sensitivity to quality and price, say analysts. No one wants to wage a price war, but the company that bundles can lower prices while increasing revenue and penetration — if they play their cards right. Consumers who buy a Cincinnati Bell bundle pay 20% less than they would buying each service separately from different companies, Cassidy said. They seem to be doing the math themselves. About 40% of the company's wireless customers subscribe to a bundle. And monthly revenues per household were up 2% in the third quarter, when 11,000 people signed up for the company's most comprehensive bundle, a 40% sequential jump.

On the issue of quality (or, as Cassidy describes it, “does the phone work at the corner of Go and Don't Go”), Cassidy pointed to a September 2002 J.D. Power study in which Cincinnati Bell Wireless customers reported higher satisfaction than the local customers of Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless. But because J.D. Power later opted to rank only carriers with an appreciable share of the national market, the 2002 study was the last year J.D. Power ranked Cincinnati Bell Wireless. Much may have changed since then.

In 2003, the company's analog wireless network became so full of subscribers that the number of dropped calls approached “unacceptable” levels. As Cassidy told an analyst on the company's third-quarter conference call, “The bucket was full. I had absolutely no place to put a wireless subscriber on my TDMA network that would be user-friendly.”

Between March and September of last year, the total number of Cinci Bell wireless subscribers sank about 2%, and in last year's third quarter, post-paid subscribers in particular were down 5% from a year earlier. “It's possible there was a general perception that the quality was not what it might have been, and that's why they were losing customers,” one analyst said. Cassidy disagrees.

Cinci Bell added customers where it could-in off-peak hours. And it killed two birds in the process. When other wireless companies were peddling pre-paid wireless to “credit-challenged” customers, Cinci Bell marketed it as a hip trend for young people. As a result, the company avoided the risk of deadbeat customers and added minutes in the under-used after-school hours when most teens make phone calls.

For a long-term solution to the full-bucket problem, Cinci Bell invested $30 million in a GSM overlay network (built with Nortel Networks equipment) in May 2003. That network was “soft-launched” in October but kept on the down-low while the carrier made sure it was dependable. This quarter, Cinci Bell is hard-launching the network with an aggressive advertising and marketing push that Cassidy won't talk about. “In retrospect, maybe we should have invested in GSM sooner,” Cassidy said.

Today the shooting sportsman is so confident in his network's performance at the corner of Go and Don't that he dismissed the advice of others to reverse the company's long-standing policy against subscriber contracts before local number portability set in.

“A lot of people told me, ‘You wait ‘til LNP. If you don't require contracts, you're going to face churn like you can't believe.’ That, in a word, is bullshit,” Cassidy said. “When customers come off a contract, they just can't wait to punish the company that artificially kept them in that relationship.”

Instead, Cassidy used his no-contract policy as a differentiator, running ads that discuss “how silly it is that college-educated adults would sign a two-year contract for a $40 phone,” he said.

Cassidy isn't expecting LNP to bring a huge change in the company's approximately 35% share of the local wireless market. And one analyst said competing products from national carriers are “formidable.” But Cincinnati Bell's bundles and its new network give analysts confidence that the carrier is cocked and loaded for a good fight in 2004.