For McCumber and Pavlo, one of the biggest challenges in keeping Carrier Finance healthy was dealing with MCI's patchwork accounting system. Telecom billing was a complex nightmare under the best circumstances, involving the aggregation of billions of transactions calculated down to the last second. MCI's meteoric growth rate forced it to allocate the bulk of its capital to building out its national fiber-optic network. Updating and upgrading its billing systems got short shrift. The accounting function was so dysfunctional that in 1988, when the company launched a toll-free 800 service, it
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