Reported by Star-Bulletin staff & wire
Monday, November 8, 1999
GTE forms venture with tower company
IRVING, Texas -- GTE Corp., the U.S. local phone company that's combining with Bell Atlantic Corp., said it formed a $900 million joint venture with Crown Castle International Corp. to manage GTE's wireless-communications towers.GTE will contribute real estate, equipment and 2,300 existing towers, and pay a leasing fee of $1,400 per month to the venture for services and space on existing and new towers. Houston-based Crown Castle, one of the largest U.S. wireless tower management companies, will contribute cash and as much as $100 million in stock to the joint venture, giving it 75 percent ownership. GTE, parent of Hawaiian Tel, is combining with Bell Atlantic to become the largest U.S. local phone company, and expanded in wireless by buying about half of Ameritech Corp.'s cellular phone business for about $3.25 billion in cash.
Priceline.com enters long-distance market
NEW YORK -- Priceline.com Inc., the Internet service that lets customers name their prices for plane tickets, hotel rooms, cars and groceries, is moving into the long distance phone business. Priceline.com said today it will let customers bid for blocks of long-distance calling time. The service will begin early next year. Daniel H. Schulman, president and chief operating officer of priceline.com, said replacing AT&T, Sprint and the other long-distance providers is not the goal. Rather, his company will work with those phone companies to maximize usage of their existing phone networks.
In other news . . .
LOS ANGELES -- A new drop in gasoline prices has brought the decline to about 3 cents a gallon over the past six weeks. The nation's average price of gasoline on Friday, including all grades and taxes , was $1.3046 per gallon, according to the Lundberg Survey of 10,000 stations.