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Verizon To Acquire MCI For $6.7 Billion

Posted by timothy on from the shifting-sands-of-time dept.

An anonymous reader submits "Even after a last minute offer from Qwest Communications, MCI board members accepted a less lucrative offer from Verizon to be bought for $6.7 billion in cash, stock and dividends. The acquisition comes after Nextel Communications and Sprint Corp. partnered up in a $35 billion deal and SBC Communications Inc. and AT&T Corp. announced a $16 billion merger plan. So, what's next for the telecom industry?"

2 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    * SBC owns AT&T
    * Verizon owns MCI

    After the baby bells were broken up, we had this very nice period where briefly, though you may not have had a choice of local phone providers, you had a real and serious choice of long-distance phone providers. Anyone else suspect this era is about to end? I think we're about to quickly go to the point where your regional local-phone monopoly quickly becomes a regional long-distance phone monopoly.

    Who wants to take bets on how many SBC customers will be using MCI in five years, or how many Verizon customers will be using AT&T?

  2. Why this matters for SPAM... by jaylee7877 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MCI is currently the largest ISP allowing (and some consider supporting) spammers to use their bandwidth. Verizon is currently one of the most aggressive anti-spam ISPs. Some have argued they've gone to far blocking legit messages often but most of their users are happy about the spam control. How these two will mesh may be a very interesting chapter in the war on Spam.