NEW YORK (AP) -- It was a high-stakes takeover battle among little-known companies intent on becoming the next AT&T in an era where telephone, Internet and TV service are one business.

The problem facing Qwest Communications and Bermuda-registered Global Crossing as they dust off from their wrestling match is that AT&T also plans to be the AT&T of that new industry, as do MCI WorldCom, Bell Atlantic and Sprint.

Clearly, Qwest won a major victory on Sunday in walking away with a nearly $35 billion deal to merge with US West, the Baby Bell phone company serving 14 states in the Rocky Mountains, Southwest and Pacific Northwest. Still, Global Crossing managed to escape the fracas without losing both US West and Frontier Corp., a local and long-distance company that Qwest also tried to muscle away.

The five-week bidding contest should ultimately strengthen both Qwest and Global Crossing, which is paying nearly $11 billion for Frontier.

But neither is a cinch to become one of the handful of communications supercarriers expected to emerge in the next decade and that Qwest and Global Crossing aspire to become.

"The overall theme that this whole ordeal really points out is that a leading telephone company five years from now will not be able to be just a long-distance company or a local phone company,'' said Mel Marten, an industry analyst at the St. Louis-based Edward Jones.

Both Qwest and Global Crossing have made a name, on Wall Street at least, with ambitious projects to build global "backbone'' networks of fibre-optic cable that would carry torrents of Internet traffic -- mostly data, but also telephone and TV signals converted to Internet-type packets of digital information.

Importantly, Frontier also sports a Qwest-like US network of fibre-optic cables to complement the mostly undersea and overseas network that Global Crossing has built. However, both Qwest and Global Crossing have lacked some of the credibility that comes with real-life customers like the businesses and consumers served by US West and Frontier. While Qwest is the nation's fourth-largest long-distance carrier, its customer base is dwarfed by those of AT&T and the other established players.

"That's why companies like US West are attractive -- because they have insight into consumers from years of servicing them and being the name on that bill,'' said Alan Alper, an industry analyst A Deal: Solomon Trujillo, chairman, president and CEO of US West with Qwest's chairman and CEO Joseph Nacchio.