A MCI shareholder is seeking support from other shareholders to block Verizon's plan to acquire the carrier. Deephaven Capital Management of Minnetonka, Minn., opposes the merger between MCI and Verizon because it does not believe it will improve value for stockholders. Deephaven favors a rival bid from Qwest. Qwest made four offers for MCI, all higher than Verizon's and all spurned by MCI due to Qwest's shaky finances. Qwest subsequently ended its quest for MCI and is now said to be eyeing smaller carriers. (Read the story)

But these mergers are bad, bad for customers, according to an economist hired by competitors of the acquirers. The proposed mergers between SBC and AT&T, and Verizon and MCI will lead to a 15% price increase for large-business customers, said Simon Wilkie, a former chief economist at the FCC and an economist working for the Alliance for Competition in Telecommunications (ACTel). The acquisitions would remove AT&T and MCI as competitors of the two giant incumbent Bells, and shut down the current wholesale market for telecom network facilities provided by AT&T, MCI and the Bells to competing telecom providers, Wilkie said. (Read the story)

While we're on the topic of badness, let's consider why one of the hottest data services may have nowhere to go. Carriers at the Supercomm 2005 conference say they require a standard network-to-network interface (NNI) between their own and other carrier networks to offer consistent multipoint Ethernet services for customers with operations across the country or the world. They say such a virtual private LAN service (VPLS) NNI would let them offer consistent service quality and more reliable service-level agreement (SLA) guarantees for meshed intercarrier Ethernet connectivity extending beyond the metropolitan-area boundary. Others argue, however, that even with a standard NNI, carriers will have to enter into lengthy negotiations and testing with specific peers to extend SLA guarantees across carrier boundaries. (Read the story)