Thomas M. Dougherty's career took him around the world in 30 years and landed him just six blocks north of the Robinson College of Business, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in business in the early 1970s.

After working with companies ranging from General Mills to Coca-Cola to BellSouth in locales as exotic as England, Ireland, Germany, Australia and Alaska, Dougherty is now leading the charge into the next generation of wireless communications as president and CEO of AirGate PCS, Inc., the nation's largest affiliate of Sprint's wireless unit.

A clear-eyed, white-haired Wisconsin native who still rushes home for Green Bay Packers games, Dougherty took over AirGate PCS in 1999 after serving as president of a Sprint PCS division.

With AirGate, Dougherty joined a company that had a gold mine but no shovels. Sprint's coverage is concentrated in major cities. It uses affiliates like AirGate to reach customers in smaller cities. The affiliates use the Sprint brand name, frequency, advertising and marketing programs, and national distribution channels such as Circuit City, Radio Shack and Best Buy. AirGate, headquartered in Atlanta, had an original territory that included Augusta and Savannah, Ga.; Charleston, Columbia and Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C.; and Charlotte, N.C.

When Dougherty took over, there were no plans for financing. Like a Packers tailback, he plunged into the public markets in September 1999 and raised $450 million in equity, bonds and secured debt to get AirGate PCS up and running.

Last year, the company spread its wings and acquired privately held iPCS Inc. for $900 million, expanding its coverage into such promising markets as Grand Rapids, Mich.; Champaign-Urbana and Springfield, Ill.; and the Quad Cities. AirGate's territory now includes 14.5 million residents in seven states through the Southeast and Midwest. The company has more than 370,000 subscribers, generating $172 million in sales.

The next steps are marketing and managing the business into its next phase, which is where the excitement comes in.

"We happen to have new product offerings coming out this year that are going to remarkably change the way we use phones," Dougherty says. He's talking about 3G ­ the third generation of wireless technology ­ and he expects Sprint to hit the ground running with it this summer. Wireless data speeds, which are now a plodding 14.4 kilobits per second, will leap to 144 kilobits a second, nearly three times the rate of a 56 kilobit dial-up modem. The faster speeds will popularize wireless use of laptop computers. Dougherty expects the speeds to double to about 300 kilobits in another year, or close to that of a DSL line.

"The really attractive part about 3G is that it will be able to combine three separate features together," he says. "The first is a fairly fast data speed. The second is voice. You combine voice and data and the software systems that take voice and convert it into data or take data and read it back to you, which is very important. And the third is location ­ the requirement for 911 service so people will be able to know where you are."

As a practical matter, he explained how it will work: "I get on a plane to San Diego. I get there and rent a car. I drive to my motel but I decide along the way I want to go to an Italian restaurant. I can just pull over to the side of the road and say 'Italian restaurant' into my phone, which will be able to look up the database to find the restaurants. It will tell me the names of Italian restaurants within a short distance of where I am, whether I need a reservation and what the menu items are.

"It will be like a very localized, personalized yellow pages," he explains. "Some of those types of things will be available this summer."

The leap forward in technology is significant enough to help fuel recovery from the recession, Dougherty believes. "There is a great deal of demand that will be pent up from the recession. I think this is very well placed in terms of timing to let us exploit that market."

Sprint's popular and quirky TV commercials ­ featuring the man in the black raincoat ­ give a boost to AirGate's marketing efforts, as the marketing challenge in the wireless industry will continue to change.

"It's very interesting that wireless has traditionally been a business tool, then it became very much of an upper-middle-class to middle-class tool, predominantly used by Caucasian families," Dougherty says. "So the market that is left is young people, Hispanics, African Americans and, believe it or not, women. Women have been undersold on wireless all of these years. More men have phones than women."