They’re left with hefty lawsuits instead of promised savings

By Gloria Irwin
Beacon Journal business writer

The idea of big savings on monthly phone service by renting a piece of equipment called a Matrix box was too good to resist for a Carroll County car dealership.

``The lure was that our bill was lower, plus it would never go up,’’ Michael Guess, the owner of Guess Motors Inc. just outside Carrollton, said of the pitch from a NorVergence salesman.

The promise of hefty savings -- ``$600 to $800 a month is what they said they could cut the phone bill,’’ Guess said -- pulled in about 11,000 small businesses nationwide.

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YellowPages.com(SM) brand is recognized as a standard of the industry

SAN ANTONIO and ATLANTA, Nov. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- A newly formed Internet yellow pages joint venture between the directory affiliates of SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE: SBC — News) and BellSouth Corp. (NYSE: BLS — News) has closed the transaction announced yesterday to acquire online directory publisher www.yellowpages.com, Inc. The new venture will utilize the highly recognized YellowPages.com brand and expects to become the market leader in Internet yellow pages and local Internet search.

The creation of this venture and acquisition of YellowPages.com now positions the two directory publishing companies of SBC and BellSouth to better serve their local Internet search customers and lays the foundation for what they expect to be a leading provider of nationwide, online yellow pages and Internet local search. Through this combination, the YellowPages.com site expects to receive more than 50 million consumer searches per month.

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MCI Inc, the Ashburn, Virginia-based company formerly known as WorldCom, has posted a $3.4 billion loss because of costs to write down the value of its telephone network

For the third quarter ending September 30 the number-two US long-distance company posted a net loss of $3.4 billion, up from a net loss of $55 million for its predecessor company WorldCom, which went into chapter 11. Excluding the one-time charge, the company posted a profit of $121 million for the July-September quarter.

Sales fell 15% to $5.08 billion from $5.97 billion, but costs from continuing operations fell 16% to $4.46 billion.

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