An IntereXchange Carrier (IXC) is a U.S. legal an regulatory term for a telecommunications company, commonly called a long-distance telephone company, such as MCI (before its absorption by Verizon), Sprint (before it spun off its IXC services c. 2006) and the former AT&T (before its merger with SBC in 2005) in the United States. It is defined as any carrier that provides inter-LATA communication, where a LATA is a local access and transport area.