Verizon buys MCI (wka WorldCom)

on NYTimes

Verizon, the nation's largest regional phone company, announced today that it had agreed to acquire MCI for about $6.7 billion in cash and stock, the latest merger in the rapidly consolidating telecommunications industry.

Verizon's acquisition would end the independence of MCI, the nation's second-largest long-distance company, with 14 million residential customers and about a million corporate customers.

"This is the right deal at the right time," Verizon's chairman and chief executive, Ivan G. Seidenberg, said in a statement.