Verizon expects to seek long-distance approvals this year in Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont, said Ivette Mendez, a Verizon spokeswoman.
"Both BellSouth and Qwest hope to win a flurry of long-distance approvals in the coming months," Levin said, "but they have a lot of ground to make up on Verizon".
SBC, however, could win long-distance approval in California.
But Verizon accurately anticipated that it would win the necessary long-distance approval within a few years.
So far, Bell Atlantic is the only Bell phone company to have won long-distance approval, for New York State.
But in none of those three states is long-distance approval likely to be granted before Thanksgiving, analysts say.
Developing those necessary support elements may end up taking longer for the regional Bell companies than winning regulatory long-distance approval.
In the Southeast, BellSouth is working hard in Georgia and is hoping to win long-distance approval for that state by Thanksgiving, though New Year's Eve is probably a more realistic target.
Verizon, which is the dominant local phone company in 14 states in New England and the Middle Atlantic region, was the first Bell company to meet that test, winning long-distance approval for New York in December 2000.
It appears that SBC is now a shoo-in to win long-distance approval in Texas, and the company is hoping to file applications for California and probably Kansas and Oklahoma in the next six months.
So, for the Bell company to win long-distance approval, it must convince regulators that it is providing those lines to outsiders at roughly the same rate at which it is providing those sorts of lines to its own digital subscriber line subsidiary.
