Thanks to its roots as a local telephone company, Sprint has about 8m access lines.

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But New York-based Verizion, the nation's largest local telephone company, must still separate its retail and wholesale operations into distinct units, each with its own accounting and customer service operations.

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EarthLink will lease the old copper telephone wires connecting homes to their local telephone company, converting calls into packets of data at that point before sending them over telecommunications wholesaler Covad 's (otc: COVD - news - people ) national data network.

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So Nynex, hardly the most popular local telephone company in America, knew it was in for a scrap when it recently unveiled a plan to deprive some Manhattanites of their treasured 212 area code--arguably the only local telephone code that is recognised from Tokyo to Tomsk.

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Soon after Qwest Communications, the biggest local-telephone company in 14 states, joined the list of firms under investigation, it was revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into the sales practices of Bristol-Myers Squibb, a big drug company.

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Svyazinvest was originally conceived both as a holding company for the state's interests in 86 local telephone firms across Russia and as a competitor for Rostelecom, a state-run near-monopoly in long-distance and international telephony.

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Then came the engineers of the state telephone company, angry at government plans to end its monopoly of non-local calls.

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