Omnipoint won the right to build a wireless network in New York City without bidding a dollar for it. The Federal Communications Commission handed the small company a pioneer's preference license, a reward for its work on new radio technology. Omnipoint then had to raise the money to build. When it went public in January 1996, it was a company with a license, big plans, and almost no revenue.

A License as a Prize

Douglas Smith founded Omnipoint in Colorado Springs in 1987 to work on spread-spectrum radio, a way of spreading a signal across many frequencies. That research earned the license for the New York area, the richest phone market in the country. Omnipoint chose GSM, the digital standard already common in Europe, and launched service in late 1996. Its customers got clear calls, text messages and phones with SIM cards, all new to most Americans.

Folded Into T-Mobile

Omnipoint priced its offering at $16 a share, above its first range of $13 to $15, and began trading on Nasdaq on January 26, 1996. The stock was near $20 by the end of its first day. Building a network cost far more than the offering raised, and Omnipoint borrowed heavily and lost money for years. In 2000 VoiceStream Wireless agreed to buy it, and the deal closed in early 2001. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream later that year and renamed it T-Mobile USA.

Cover: An Icy Night, New York, Alfred Stieglitz. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a winter night in New York (the first market).