MCI Inc. said yesterday that it doesn’t expect to add new residential calling customers because costs are increasing, the second major phone company in two weeks to announce its exit from residential phone service.
«We anticipate to downsize our [consumer business] effort significantly,» said Wayne Huyard, president of MCI’s U.S. sales and service division.

Mr. Huyard didn’t offer details about MCI’s plans, but the nation’s second-largest long-distance provider wants to turn its attention to the more profitable commercial business.
AT&T Corp., the nation’s largest long-distance provider, said July 22 that it will stop trying to attract customers but continue to provide long-distance and local service to its 35 million residential customers. AT&T is walking away from the residential-calling business because revenue has fallen owing to increased competition and higher costs.
MCI has 3.5 million residential customers for its local and long-distance phone service, and company officials said revenue from those customers amounts to about $3 billion annually.
«We don’t expect [residential phone service] will be a growth engine,» MCI spokesman Peter Lucht said after the company outlined its plan in a conference call to discuss second-quarter earnings.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) — One in six U.S. adults was victimized by fraud over the course of a year, from long-distance phone service switched without their permission to magazine subscriptions that never arrive, the U. S. Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.
Some 25 million Americans paid for loans that never came through, signed up for illegal «credit repair» services that didn’t improve their credit scores, or otherwise lost money in fraudulent scams, the FTC reported.

Another 14 million had their long-distance phone service switched without their permission, a practice known as «slamming,» the FTC said in its first-ever survey of consumer fraud.

The survey of 2,500 consumers was taken late May and early June of 2003. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent. An FTC statistician said the time since the survey was taken was spent analyzing the results and compiling the report.

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NEW YORK (AP) — AT&T Corp. said it may write down the value of some of its $43.8 billion in assets, intensifying speculation that the nation’s largest long-distance phone company is a takeover target.

The company said last month it would stop marketing its residential services. In its second-quarter report filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that decision means it can review its assets for a possible write down.

The company could write down some of its $22.8 billion in property, plant and equipment or $4.7 billion in goodwill, a measure of the intangible value of an asset. A write-down, which analysts estimate could be in the billions of dollars, would reflect that its assets have declined in value since the company invested billions of dollars in upgrading its network during the telecom boom. As prices for long-distance decrease, so does the value of a long-distance network. AT&T’s largest rival, MCI Inc., has written down nearly $80 billion in assets.

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HARRY. R. WEBER
Associated Press

ATLANTA — The days of the local phone company being only concerned about your landline are over.

Competition and evolving technology mean local phone providers are shifting more of their focus to nontraditional services like wireless, Internet and video, relegating the landline phone to a smaller role in the growth of the telecommunications industry.

More than half of New York-based Verizon Communications Inc.’s business today comes from offerings other than local phone service, including wireless and Internet access.

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