MCI Seeking $5.8 Billion From AT

MCI Communications, claiming that its struggle to become an alternative long-distance telephone service nationally was nearly smothered in infancy by American Telephone & Telegraph, returns to U.S. District Court here today to seek $5.8 billion in damages from AT&T--an; amount six times what MCI sought in the original trial concluded five years ago.

AT&T; counters that its liability should not exceed $10 million.

AT&T; was found guilty in 1980 of violating antitrust laws in delaying MCI’s expansion. AT&T; was ordered to pay MCI $600 million of the $900 million sought. But an appeals court later ordered a new trial on the damage award.

John Worthington, general counsel for MCI, said in an interview that MCI is seeking more money now because of substantially refined estimates of how much business it had been deprived of due to AT&T;’s slowness in providing MCI with the local connections it needed for its customers to originate and complete long-distance calls over MCI’s network.

“We were slowed in expanding our network,” Worthington said, “and this caused us to lose business.”

Based on actual demand in the early 1980s, MCI now believes that its revenue would have been far greater than it had calculated in its earlier estimate, which Worthington called “very conservative.”

“Now that we have the actual numbers, they far exceed the estimates,” he said.

But Blair White, a lawyer for AT&T;, said the company should be required to pay only $10 million because the period in which damages were experienced was limited to seven months in late 1973 and early 1974.

White said AT&T; will challenge MCI’s growth assumptions, arguing that any delay in MCI’s expansion did not materially harm the competitor.

“We don’t think there are any damages from what happened back then,” he said.

The previous trial, before the same court that is to hear the retrial, established that AT&T; was slow during that period to install the equipment that MCI needed to connect its long-distance lines to customers through AT&T; switches and local networks.

The appeals court accepted the verdict but ordered a new trial on the amount of damages.