Eric Bennett Hertz (31 December 1954 – 30 March 2013) was an American, and the CEO of 2degrees, New Zealand's third largest mobile telecommunications company.Hertz was responsible for the installation of the first cellular phone system in Portland, Maine in the 1980s. His future wife, Kathy, worked in a management role for AT&T in New York and New Jersey; they married in 1983. He worked for BellSouth in Ecuador, where he learnt to speak Spanish fluently.