MCI to Drop Resales of Local Service

MCI Communications will push ahead with building networks to provide local phone service, but it is giving up on its current effort to enter the business by reselling other companies’ local service under the MCI brand. MCI President Timothy Price said the company will stop marketing resold local phone service to new residential and business customers. The 100,000 customers who now buy resold service from MCI in California, Illinois, New York and Michigan will continue to be served, he said. Price said current regulations make it too expensive for MCI to provide local service through two other routes--leasing lines and other pieces of existing networks and buying local service in bulk and reselling it under MCI’s brand. “Spending money on resale, or where network elements are overpriced, is not an investment,” Price said. Citing the same reasons, long-distance company AT&T; recently stopped marketing local phone service and proposed to take over Teleport, a company providing local phone service mostly to business customers. MCI shares rose 50 cents to close at $45.13 on Nasdaq.