January 2014
| Business World Magazine | 127
golf, and then they sat and talked about
how they were going to deploy their net-
works and what was working and what
wasn’t working. Twenty years ago, the
wireless revolution was just beginning, so
these carriers were pretty much pioneers
in the world.
RCA’s membership expanded over
the years just as the industry grew from
a couple thousand wireless subscribers to
over 300 million wireless subscribers in
the United States. I came here a little over
four years ago, which was about the time
the Board decided they needed a strong
effective policy voice in Washington,
D.C. They needed someone to represent
them before the FCC, Congress and the
executive branch, and do so on a 24/7 ba-
sis in pursuit of their policy goals and as-
pirations to continue to thrive in the wire-
less world. In recent years as the industry
has consolidated and become dominated
by two national carriers, the membership
has expanded further to include some of
the small Tier I companies like Sprint and
T-Mobile – providing a united voice for
competitive carriers of all sizes.
On RCA’s 20th anniversary in Septem-
ber of 2012, we renamed the organization
to CCA, the Competitive Carriers Asso-
ciation, to better reflect the makeup of our
membership. CCA now essentially repre-
sents every carrier in the U.S. other than
the largest two, and we have become the
home for competitive carriers who want
to ensure they can continue to compete in
the industry. The reality became that our
members – whether Tier I companies or
