1.   Then the Government quietly pulled out and turned the operation over to a handful of communications giants and the long-distance phone companies.

2.   And the interest of the German communications giant, Deutsche Telekom, has been more than explicit.

3.   A heated rivalry between two communications equipment giants, Lucent Technologies Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., got a few degrees hotter.

4.   Capital spending at Motorola, the communications giant, has been curtailed because of a worldwide downturn in semiconductor sales and falling prices for these computer chips.

5.   Consider the recent bidding war between Bell Atlanticand Vodafone for Airtouch, the wireless communications giant.

6.   Communications giants are scrambling to reshape their industry, driven by a federal deadline for bidders on new wireless licenses.

7.   David L. House, president of the Nortel Networks Corp. of Canada, the communications equipment giant, will resign as soon as this summer, Nortel said Monday.

8.   Despite obstacles, such as clashes in corporate cultures, phone companies probably will have better luck than Humpty Dumpty putting themselves together as full-service communications giants.

9.   Dissolution would set the stage for Sprint to be acquired by another communications giant and for Deutsche Telekom to seek international acquisitions of its own.

10.   Ebbers built a tiny long-distance telephone company into a communications giant.