Cable & Wireless isn't happy

Cable & Wireless is suing MCI nearly seven months after it acquired MCI's Internet business.

In a 23 page civil action that demands a jury trial determine the outcome of the case, C&W says that MCI did not live up to its end of the deal.

C&W claims that it did not receive pertinent information about thousands of MCI's Internet customers amounting to 37% of all customers. Information such as the correct contact name at a company or the contact persons phone number or past billing history, was missing from the C&W customer database.

C&W also claims that MCI did not send over enough of or the appropriate staff members in the deal. For example C&W estimates that over 300 sales people should have come over in the transaction, but only 41 did and none of them were in management.

Neither company will comment on the lawsuit, therefore it is difficult to determine who's right in this scenario, but some former MCI employees have said that some of what's being claimed is true.

One former employee did tell Network World that there was some creative employee reassignments prior to the deal being final in the engineering and public relations departments specifically. However, it is not clear whether this type of finagling constitutes a breach of contract.

Even is this doesn't go to trial, one thing this lawsuit does indicate is that C&W must still have some problems regarding its Internet business to resolve. Has C&W not hired enough people to fill these MCI spaces? Considering the hiring spree they've been on one would imagine that they have filled a lot of those empty slots by now.

Have they lost customers because they didn't know whom to contact? Well if they did loose customers initially, C&W CEO Denny Matteucci, didn't lead us to believe that was the case during an interview a few months ago. And even if Cable & Wireless did loose customers, it's probably going to be pretty difficult to prove it was because they didn't have the correct phone number or contact name.

Denise Pappalardo is a senior editor for Network World, covering ISPs, VPNs and related topics. Reach her at denisep@nww.com.