WorldCom Bankruptcy Poses Financial Risks to Other Phone Companies
If anything, long-distance customers may benefit from further price breaks, as WorldCom will be under less pressure to maintain its revenue to meet payments to creditors. But because price wars have contributed to the telecommunications industry's problems, further pressure on that front would add to the challenges facing other carriers, particularly the big long-distance companies AT&T and Sprint.

Of more immediate concern to the other carriers, though, is the prospect of not being paid by WorldCom, which typically gives them tens of millions of dollars a month in the complex give-and-take by which carriers connect one another's customers in a vast communications web.

The industry's largest trade group sent a letter over the weekend to the Federal Communications Commission, asking for permission to pass along the costs to their own customers if WorldCom falls behind on its network-connection payments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/business/22NEXT.html