MCI came to Washington in 1972 with so few assets that it became known as a law office with an antenna.
Today, that once-combative law office has grown into a 98,000-mile telecommunications network, with annual revenue of more than $20 billion. Even more significant, perhaps, MCI's growth helped make Washington a major telecommunications center, an idea that would have been hard to imagine 30 years ago when telecommunications entrepreneurs were a new breed.
Workers staff the MCI long-distance center in Reston in 1988. The company helped make Washington a telecom hub.
(Harry Naltchayan -- The Washington Post)
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Video Verizon Communications Inc. has agreed to acquire MCI Corp. for more than $6.7 billion in a deal represents the third big telephone industry merger in two months.
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_____Telecom Deals_____ The Verizon-MCI deal announced on Feb. 14 is the third major telecom merger unveiled since December.
• On Jan. 31, the Texas-based Baby Bell SBC Communications announced its acquisition of AT&T for $16 billion.
• In December, two leading wireless phone services -- Nextel and Sprint -- announced that they would merge in a $35 billion deal. | | |
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"MCI served almost as the Harvard/Yale in terms of educating the telecommunications executive," said Washington attorney Andrew Lipman, whose law firm has represented MCI and other telecommunications firms. "It was really an incubator for dozens and dozens of other companies. . . . If you look across the competitive telecom industry, you find many companies in the region that are populated in the executive level with MCI grads."
MCI "really made the Washington metropolitan area the alternative competitive telecommunications center of gravity," said Daniel F. Akerson, a former MCI president who went on to become chief executive of Nextel Communications Inc. and XO Communications Inc.
As head of both companies, Akerson said, he moved their headquarters to Washington from Seattle. The reason was simple, he said: There was a "a boiling pot, a stew of talent" in the area, as hundreds of telecommunications experts came to work either at MCI or a cast of supporting firms.
Many other firms also came or set up here for that expertise, while others moved here either because they were customers of MCI's, taking advantage of its network to provide their own services, or because they wanted to sell equipment or services, such as billing and software, to the telecommunications firm.
Still other companies followed MCI's example and opened offices here seeking to use the federal government as a way to get into the business. For some, that meant selling telecommunications service to the government; for others, it meant seeking congressional support and regulatory decisions to allow them to compete in the increasingly cutthroat telecommunications industry.
The list of independent firms that have come and gone continues to grow. It includes Teligent Inc., PSINet Inc., Cable & Wireless USA and E.spire Communications Inc. Soon, MCI will be added to that list, as will Nextel, which is merging with Sprint.
But a handful survive, including XO, Primus Telecommunications Group Inc., Talk America Holdings Inc., Ciena Corp. and LCC International Inc. And smaller firms -- many headed by MCI alumni -- continue to emerge, focusing on niche markets, just like MCI did in its early days.
That includes Vienna-based SunRocket, a new Internet phone company, whose top three executives came from MCI. The MCI experience provides "a lust for competition, confidence and the conviction that you can do something better," said Joyce Dorris, SunRocket's chief marketing officer. Dorris was MCI's chief marketing officer for residential service when she left in 2002. The MCI attitude "to focus on niches and think outside the box . . . has been seeded all around Washington," Dorris said.
