In the next three or four years you'll see a tremendous amount of consolidation as people try to put things back together. The thing that the communications companies like is that these services are sticky. Long distance isn't sticky. You can change your service supplier every day, and nobody would know. But your local number is as sticky as it gets.
Nobody wants to change that.
Your e-mail is fairly sticky, too. So they're trying to tie the rest of their services to that last, stickiest step, which is that last local piece of the connection. That's what all telecom companies will try to do. All the other stuff is noise until they figure out who they're lined up with. Everything else is transient.