Bidding for the 10-year, $1.8 billion contract were WorldCom, IBM and ConnectGA, a partnership of BellSouth, AT&T and EDS. The contract would have placed 500 state workers on the contractor's payroll and would have been the largest contract ever awarded by Georgia.

The project would have consolidated all communications services under a single contract and ensured that all state agencies paid the same amount for services, such as long-distance and cellular phones. The state currently deals with several high-tech vendors to provide services for individual agencies.

Figuring into Perdue's decision to drop the telecom plan were the $100,000 in political contributions made by executives and lobbyists of ConnectGA to former Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes who lost to Republican Perdue in the November 2001 elections, area office and business brokers familiar with the telecom contract negotiations, tell GlobeSt.com. Perdue received only a token amount of financial support from the ConnectGA group, brokers say.