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A little more than two years ago, Craig McCaw saw an opportunity to help Nextel Communications Inc. build its digital wireless network faster by creating a spinoff company that could attack smaller markets.
He put together a plan with John Chapple, a former McCaw Cellular Communications executive, launching service under the name Nextel Partners Inc. in the fall of 1998.
Today, Kirkland-based Nextel Partners is a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $6.7 billion. It employ's some 1,000, and the Kirkland company is on track to bring in $125 million in sales, one analyst estimates.
Like its Reston, Va.-based parent Nextel Partners offers business customers cellular, paging and dispatch services from a single phone. While Nextel Communications concentrates on the nation's largest metropolitan areas, the Nextel Partners targets smaller markets such as Boise, Idaho; Syracuse, N.Y.; and Shreveport, La.
Surprisingly, the young spinoff posted industry-leading figures in two closely watched operating areas for telecommunications firms: average revenue per subscriber and subscriber turnover. Nextel Partners not only...