Word: bons
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...Michel Bon, chairman of France Telecom, is chatting by cell phone about 3G, a wireless technology on which he has wagered his career and his business. Suddenly, his voice starts to fade and become unclear. Then he disconnects completely. "I'm sorry," Bon says in his French-inflected English when he rings back a minute later. "My mobile, despite it is an Orange, I can say is not always perfect." France Telecom, of course, owns the lion's share of Orange...
...want to understand why the European telecom industry is throwing more than $230 billion into upgrading to 3G - shorthand for third generation - look no further than Bon's occasionally dodgy telephone. (Not that the handsets linked up to BT Cellnet or Vodafone are any better.) Though mobiles have come a long way since the days when Gordon Gekko stood on the beach talking to a brick, you still wouldn't make a call on one if a landline was available. And if voice services are skimming the edge of adequacy, that's still more than anyone could...
...telecom operators and their investors, on the other hand, it looks more like a financial disaster. Bon's France Telecom has increased its debt to a staggering $55 billion in large part to pay for 3G. Likewise, Deutsche Telekom now owes $50 billion, and British Telecom $43 billion. (It's not all 3G; these firms have also been on acquisition sprees.) And here's the scariest part: there's no guarantee that 3G will...
...Telecom were bidding their borrowed billions on licenses last year, it looked like the loans would be a lot easier to pay off than they are today. "We have a plan that will bring our debt down into the range of $27 billion to $36 billion by 2003," says Bon. A nice plan indeed, but mind the yawning $9 billion gap. (A company worth $9 billion on the London Stock Exchange might qualify for the blue-chip FTSE 100 index.) The reason the numbers are so vague is that the debt reduction plan depends on selling some of the firms...
...that the four men share in the Harvard MBTA stop is the only scene which seems to speak directly to the Harvard elite. Unfortunately, the powerful image and sentiment conveyed by this initial scene is not supported throughout the piece. Scenes occuring in the Hong Kong and Au Bon Pain simply use these places as backdrops from which the story is told rather than integrating them into the show itself. A stronger connection between the lives and the six characters portrayed here and the negligence of the Harvard community might have reinforced the proposed goal of the opera?...