The local phone company that covers the Northeast, which was once known as Bell Atlantic Corp., needs to recoup some savings from its purchase of GTE Corp. Verizon employs a total of 260,000 people with 19,000 employees in Massachusetts.

According to Bob Noble, company spokesperson, none of the company's facilities will be affected by the cutbacks. The company has switching offices in 100's of communities across the state with over a dozen in the city alone. The company also owns a building at 185 Franklin St. here and leases space at 125 High Street, which is also downtown. A number of weeks ago, sources told GlobeSt.com that Verizon was planning on subletting space on High Street, but Noble denies those rumors.

"We would move people from other facilities before we got into serious subletting," he tells GlobeSt.com. Noble adds that the switching offices are the heart and soul of the telephone operations and that those facilities have to stay up and running.