Eagle River Investments, the investment management firm established by cellular phone pioneer Craig McCaw, is abandoning its proposed investment in Iridium. Instead, Eagle River said it will focus its satellite investments on data-centric companies, such as ICO Global and Teledesic. "With the powerful influence of the Internet on global communications, we've made a strategic decision to focus our resources and attention on the satellite-based data services that ICO and Teledesic can provide," Dennis Weibling, president of Eagle River, said in a statement. "After careful examination of Iridium's technologies, we determined that there are closer synergies between ICO and Teledesic and the services they will provide customers worldwide." Eagle River Investments is providing up to $1.2 billion to ICO, money that will allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy. Teledesic is the Ka-Band company backed by McCaw, Microsoft's Bill Gates and others that plans to launch in a few years. On Feb. 17, a New York bankruptcy judge approved an interim financing for Iridium from Eagle River. Last week, the court granted Iridium bondholders permission to sue the sat-phone company's main backer, Motorola. Under McCaw's plan, Iridium bondholders' financial interest in the company may have become worthless.

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DISH Adds St Louis-Portland

Today, EchoStar's DISH Network will begin offering local channels in Portland, Ore., and the surrounding areas. Portland channels that are part of the local TV package are KATU-ABC, KOIN-CBS, KGW-NBC and KPDX-FOX. Last week, DISH added these local channels in St. Louis: KDNL-ABC, KMOV-CBS, KSDK-NBC and KTVI-FOX. With the addition of St. Louis and Portland, DISH Network now offers local channels via satellite TV in 26 cities and their metro areas. The local package sells for $4.99 a month. A national PBS channel can be purchased for an additional $1. Last week, DirecTV added St. Louis and Sacramento local channels.

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SkyBOX: Northpoint Flimflam and the FCC

You gotta give them points for chutzpah. In their latest scheme, the politically well-connected folks at Northpoint are basing their grab for DBS spectrum on tests which they won't let DBS companies verify, duplicate or even get a very close look at. Hmmmm. Kind of like having a three year old tell you you don't need to check her room because it's already clean. Honest. But then Northpoint - much beloved by several Republican bigwigs - has never lacked for chutzpah. Their basic scheme involves "reusing" DBS spectrum via terrestrial wireless signals which would be aimed at a north-pointing dish (as opposed to the DBS south-pointing dish). To promote this scheme, Northpoint slicked itself into the local-to-local debate by claiming that it wanted to make sure DBS customers could get their local signals. Of course the company is asking for enough spectrum to duplicate the entire DBS service itself, but hey, who's counting? The DBS guys naturally yelled foul, noting that the Northpoint service could easily interfere with their signals. So Northpoint conducted tests. The tests showed no interference. Wow! But when the satellite companies asked to duplicate the tests using the Northpoint transmitters, they were turned down. Flat. And no wonder. In Communications Engineering and Design, President of Telecommunications and Technology Jeffrey Krauss commented on Northpoint's scheme by pointing out that "the idea is totally and fatally flawed, and nothing more than a grab for spectrum." So will the FCC fall for it? Despite a letter of protest signed by DirecTV, EchoStar, the SBCA, Boeing, Galaxy Latin America, GE Americom, Loral, PanAmSat, Pegasus and SkyBridge (which, by the way, worked with the DBS companies to insure that its own spectrum sharing scheme would be acceptable to all)? As we said before, those Northpoint folks are well-connected. And in the special interest sewers of Washington, D.C., darn near anything can happen. As DirecPC Turns - The Update: For those of you who have been asking about the status of our DirecPC service, it appears that the folk sat Hughes really DO care about this puppy. We've received many calls offering help. Even better, we've talked to a lot of folks about how they plan to upgrade their customer care, and we're assured big upgrades are in the works. Our system still isn't up and running, but that's not due to a lack of effort from DirecPC. Fact is, we're taking some time off to jump out of helicopters in Canada. So next week's SkyBOX will be authored by another. The week after that we'll let you know about our much-missed satellite Internet service. EH Do you have a comment or letter for SkyBOX? Write the editors at: editor@skyreport.com.

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PEOPLE: SBCA Hires Communications Director