WinFirst might be cable's bundled, sleeping giant.

• Position: Multiple topics - Brief Article

So who cares if Philadelphia, home of Comcast Corp., takes away AT&T Broadband, and Denver's title to Cabletown USA?

A little known Denver company, WinFirst, has the potential to make cable guy John Malone's fantasy of 500 cable channels, and C. Michael Armstrong's dream of bundling cable and telephone services, into profit-making reality.

WinFirst, founded in 1999 byJames C. Vaughn, is already selling bundled packages of cable TV, fiber-optic, high-speed Internet service and local and long-distance telephone service to residential customers in Sacramento, Calif., for prices ranging from $99 to $120 a month.

WinFirst President and COO Frank Casazza said the 750-employee company (75 at the corporate headquarters on South Colorado Boulevard in Denver and the rest in California) is funded with $900 million put up by Vaughn and blue-chip investors like J.P. Morgan, Columbia Capital, First Unionv Capital Partners and Madison Dearborn Partners. Vaughn sold his own cable company, FrontierVision, in 1999 for $2.l billion

By Christmas, Casazza said, WinFirst's cable crews had strung enough fiber to provide "last-mile" coverage to 20,000 Sacramento homes; and take-rates and feedback from those customers have been "exceptional."

Casazza wouldn't, however, disclose exact numbers of customers who have bought the services. Getting local TV cable franchises from city governments and state publicutility approval to offer telephone service are the biggest hurdles the company must jump when targeting a market.

Casazza said WinFirst wants to keep a low profile until it's sure it can deliver services to a significant number of happy customers. Dallas is next to be wired, with other major Texas and California markets after that. Although it is headquartered here, don't expect to see WinFirst offer its services in Colorado for some time.

buzz

BIOTECH IS ALL OVER THE PLACE, AND COLORADO IS TRYING TO KEEP UP.

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Then open December's Red Herring, the magazine about tech innovation, and you'll find a package of stories about a European challenge to American biotech giants.

Amid all that, the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business hosted its annual...