WASHINGTON — Morgan E. O'Brien is used to jolting the wireless industry. Now the Nextel co-founder is back in the start-up business and again aiming to shake up the airwaves...

This time, the 62-year-old entrepreneur is pitching a controversial plan to transform public safety communications while also extending high-speed wireless Internet service to hard-to-reach rural areas.

His attempt to gain federal approval for his idea may be his biggest challenge yet. Supporters laud him as a visionary. Detractors brand him a profiteer...

O'Brien wants Congress to turn over a large chunk of valuable public airwaves — a multibillion-dollar swath of spectrum coveted by wireless phone companies — to a nonprofit trust operated by public safety officials in partnership, he hopes, with his new McLean, Va.-based company, Cyren Call Communications Corp. Together, they would build a state-of-the-art, high-speed network covering more than 99% of the U.S. population...

[Some] say O'Brien's plan is nothing more than a boondoggle.

"Public safety is just a fig leaf to profiteering," said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank...

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