DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Here's a look at today's "CNN 20."</s>ANNOUNCER: Bringing you the world for 20 years, this is CNN.</s>UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Telecommunications watchers say this marriage makes a lot of sense. Bell Atlantic is an aggressively growing "baby Bell" with some 40 million local phone customers from Maine to Virginia. GTE provides local and long distance service and has been investing heavily in state-of-the-art fiber-optic wiring.</s>BRUCE FRANCIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It was clear that this former "baby Bell" was no baby anymore. They really got the kind of scale that they needed to try to be a new national telephone company. That job was going to be difficult, that was clear, but they had a lot of the key parts with this deal.</s>RAYMOND SMITH, CHAIRMAN, BELL ATLANTIC: And let me make one thing perfectly clear. This is a merger of equals in every way.</s>CHARLES LEE, CHAIRMAN & CEO, GTE: The hallmark of this company will be its ability to accelerate growth -- more growth than either company could have had on their own. And it will be building upon the complimentary strengths to bring new, competitively priced service to million of consumers and business customers.</s>FRANCIS: The scale was really what made the deal click for GTE Bell Atlantic. At the time of the deal, they had about 63 million lines out there and they reached about 20 percent of the population. GTE had some very significant Internet access, and we were beginning to see at this time that the Internet was going to be a good way to offer telephone service to people one day, although it's still going through some growing pains.
CNN 20: Bell Atlantic and GTE Merger, July 28, 1998