Golden Chutes
Lucent Technologies paid sacked CEO Richard McGinn $5.5 million in severance after he failed to engineer a quick turnaround of the troubled gear maker, and agreed to pay former Chief Financial Officer Deborah Hopkins $3.3 million, the company reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. McGinn was replaced last October by his predecessor, Henry Schacht. Lucent shares are down more than 50 percent for the year.
Net Cast
The Federal Communications Commission is now looking for third-generation wireless spectrum on bands occupied by mobile satellite, amateur radio and unlicensed personal communications services. The new bandwidth would allow deployment of bandwidth-hungry wireless services. The FCC had been considering freeing up spectrum in bands already occupied by the Department of Defense, and some religious institutions and television stations.
Access Adds Up
The National Cable and Telecommunications Association says the number of U.S. customers getting high-speed Internet access via cable modem jumped by 920,000 to 5.5 million in the second quarter, about 8.5 percent of the 65 million homes able to receive the advanced service.
No Deal —Yet
CenturyTel has twice rejected an unsolicited $6.1 billion stock- and-cash “bear hug” offer from Alltel that would have created the largest rural phone company in the country. Alltels offer represented a 40 percent premium to shareholders. CenturyTel, in the process of splitting off its wireless services, is well-protected against a hostile bid, thanks to its board structure, its shareholder meeting schedule and a shareholder rights plan that would make a takeover prohibitively expensive.