In the wake of WorldCom Inc.'s stunning acknowledgement that it hid billions of dollars in losses from investors and will cut thousands of jobs, industry experts predicted yesterday that Marylanders who work for the company or subscribe to its services may feel the punch in different ways.

Although WorldCom did not announce where its reported 17,000 layoffs will occur, a disproportionate number may fall in the Baltimore-Washington region because MCI, the company's struggling long-distance carrier, is based in Washington, said F. Drake Johnstone, a telecommunications analyst with Davenport & Co. in Richmond, Va.

"Obviously, there's a huge employment base and MCI is one of its weakest businesses, so if WorldCom says that it's laying off 17,000 workers, there's potential for greater layoffs" in this area, said Johnstone, who figures that problems will worsen as corporate and perhaps government customers migrate to other phone companies.

"The behavior is so egregious that if you're a consumer and you got a call from WorldCom, you'd probably hang up the phone," he said. "President Bush even came out and expressed outrage."

Johnstone thinks the news coverage of the $3.8-billion accounting revelation has been blown out of proportion because it was already known that WorldCom was being investigated for bookkeeping questions. "It's not as if a brand new company is guilty of bad behavior," he said. "I don't think that the public should go, 'Oh, my gosh, what's happening?' Hopefully, we're coming to the end of this parade of villains."

Not everyone is so sure.

With WorldCom's now-discredited and fired chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan, claiming that he followed accepted industry practice, some are wondering whether irregularities will surface in other telecommunications companies which, like WorldCom, lease one another's lines.

"We really need to see what was going on at WorldCom and make sure other telecom companies weren't doing the same type of thing," said H. Russell Frisby Jr. He is president of the Competitive Telecommunications Association, a Washington-based trade group for local-exchange phone companies, including WorldCom.

Digex Inc., a corporate Web-hosting company based in Laurel that is majority-owned by WorldCom, said yesterday that it cut 86 jobs, or 7 percent of its work force, but that the problems of the parent company weren't the cause.

Secret Wherrett, a Digex spokeswoman, said the layoffs are not related to cutbacks at WorldCom. "We operate separately and independently, and any actions taken to cut costs are done so and by our management, completely separate from any numbers that they disclose," she said.

Meanwhile, the state pension system lost $58.1 million because of its WorldCom holdings, said system spokesman Joseph M. Coale "That's less than one-fifth of 1 percent of our assets," Coale said. "It shows the value of diversification."

The system, which has total assets of $27.8 billion, held $35.1 million in WorldCom stock, through index funds, and another $16.7 million in bonds. The state's equity position in the company was automatically canceled when WorldCom was dropped from the Standard & Poor's 500 on May 14.

Analysts differ about the WorldCom debacle's likely impact on consumers.

"If you lay off 17,000 staffers and have half as many operators, when you have a billing problem, it will take twice as long for the phone to get answered. There will be a deterioration of the quality of service over time," predicted Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America in Washington.

Maribel Bolinov, a telecom analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., said that whenever a company goes through this type of turmoil, there are always questions about whether operations will be affected. But a service provider doesn't want to lay off workers where their operations could be affected, she said.

"They want to keep the network very reliable so that people don't complain about their service and go fleeing," Bolinov said.

And while WorldCom provides Internet services to "just about everybody," Bolinov said she doesn't expect any impact on service for quite some time. "Nobody starts running in when they're bankrupt and ripping switches out," she said.

Other experts agree that the possibility of WorldCom's network being turned off is highly unlikely.

"I think its important for local consumers to realize that it's extremely unlikely, highly unlikely, that the government would allow this company to go dark, essentially to just shut it down, turn off the lights and walk away," said Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research Corp., a telecommunications market research company in Parsippany, N.J.

Joe Laszlo, a senior analyst who follows telecom for Jupiter Research in New York, agrees that turning off the WorldCom network is highly unlikely and said that even if it did happen, consumers need not worry about their service being affected. Internet service providers, such as Earthlink, typically work through two or three networking providers and wouldn't be relying solely on WorldCom, he said.

"It probably shouldn't even affect them indirectly if WorldCom's network was shut down," Laszlo said.

Staff writer Kristine Henry contributed to this report