By purchasing Satellite Business Systems in 1986, MCI might be said to have taken back a venture that it had started fifteen years earlier, in January 1971, together with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation - MCI Lockheed Satellite Corporation (MCIL). MCIL was one of the first companies to file with the FCC an application to construct and operate a domestic communication satellite system. In 1972, Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) joined MCIL, and a restructured venture in January 1973 was renamed CML Satellite Corporation (CML). In 1974, COMSAT and IBM agreed to join in the ownership of CML, and after an investigation by the FCC and a decision on acceptable corporate structure, COMSAT and IBM purchased the interests of MCI and Lockheed in CML and contributed the CML assets to Satellite Business Systems (SBS) on the signing of a partnership agreement in July 1975. Under pressure from the FCC, Aetna Life & Casualty Company was added to the SBS partnership in December 1975.

The initial business plan of SBS was to establish a satellite-based private line network for IBM, to use this network for development of new applications and services to be marketed to other large American corporations, and to develop in collaboration with COMSAT prototype satellite transponders and terminals for the 12 and 14 Gigahertz [GHz] radio frequencies. In March 1981, SBS began delivering integrated voice, data, electronic mail, and video communications transmissions over the first all digital domestic commercial communication satellite system using satellites designed and built by Hughes Aircraft Company. The system also included small radio frequency (RF) ground terminals with antenna designed to be mounted on the rooftops of SBS and its customers' facilities, or on the ground adjacent to them.

A combination of strategic, operational and marketing problems conspired to prevent SBS from ever achieving financial independence from its partners annual capital contributions. Customers perceptions of lower call quality through satellite networks inhibited acceptance of the SBS product, and the increasing significance of fiber optic transmission undermined the entire network concept of SBS. As early as 1982, after only a year of active operations, internal studies were recommending comprehensive overhauling of SBS's initial business assumptions.

When MCI started the acquisition process in 1985, SBS was a Connecticut general partnership owned by IBM's subsidiaries: Information Satellite Corporation (ISC); BCI Satellite, Inc. (BCI), formerly COMSAT Corporation's subsidiary COMSAT General Business Communications, Inc.; and Development Technology Corporation (DTC), former Aetna Life & Casualty's subsidiary Aetna Diversified Technologies, Inc. (ADT). (Agreement and Plan of Reorganization Relating to the Transfer of Satellite Business Systems to MCI Communications Corporation, Volume I, October 18, 1985, Glossary and pp. 1-5.) Through the SBS acquisition, MCI sought to strengthen its position in the business telecommunication market via the prestige of a relationship with IBM, while IBM wanted to get rid of a subsidiary which was losing $120 million per year. It took two years of hard work to integrate SBS's network, services, customers and employees into the MCI structure and to make the merger work.