Cable & Wireless Plans U.S. Marketing Campaign

Cable & Wireless Plc, the second-largest U.K. phone company, said it will boost its U.S. marketing and advertising as it seeks to add phone and Internet customers.

Cable & Wireless USA provides low long-distance phone rates over its nationwide fiber-optic network. It currently offers its Internet consumers 7 cents a minute for long-distance phone calls on weekdays and 5 cents a minute on weekends.

Since buying MCI’s Internet network last fall, Cable & Wireless USA said it has lost some Internet customers.

“We are in the process of defining and building marketing strategies,” Sue Keith, senior manager, marketing communications at Vienna, VA-based Cable & Wireless USA, told Bloomberg News. “Expect to hear about us in the marketplace with a big splash” in the first half of 1999, she said. Spending plans were not disclosed.

Keith said the company has lost an unspecified number of the 500,000 Internet customers it had after it purchased MCI’s Internet assets last year for $1.75 billion.