Meg Ryan’s lead role for Ulster

Belfast Telegraph
4/15/04

Hollywood star Meg Ryan is to appear in a documentary about Northern Ireland children, the Telegraph can reveal today.

The documentary will be watched by a host of celebrities at the United Nations headquarters in New York later this month.

Stars expected to join the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, include Mia Farrow, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Matrix star Laurence Fishburne and singer Harry Belafonte.

The documentary was made for the “What’s Going ON? documentary series on the Showtime channel in the US, a series that examines the impact of violent conflict on children.

Meg Ryan who starred in When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You Got Mail agreed to appear in the documentary along with Irish Tenor, Ronan Tynan.

The documentary visits children on both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland and examines how their lives have changed since the cease fires.

A special screening of the documentary s scheduled for April 29 at the UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld auditorium.

Secretary General Annan agreed to appear at the function as a way of promoting awareness of conflict resolution in Northern Ireland and around the world.

The UN co-produced the documentary series a part of a funding program that promotes children’ rights.

The documentary will broadcast on US television on April 25, with two repeats on May 9 and a fourth showing on May 20.

The documentary was co-produced by the UN and telecommunications giant, RCN, which is headed by prominent Irish American businessman David McCourt.

Mr. McCourt is to be honored by the American Irish Society in November for his work on the documentary and for work for the Irish community in the US.

Previous recipients of the society’s Gold Medal include U2 lead singer Bono, former US president Ronald Reagan and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

C-Tec Aims to Copy MFS Success Story

Omaha World Herald
11/3/1996

A sequel to the Cinderella story of MFS Communications Inc. of Omaha is being written on the East Coast.

Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc. is nurturing another telecommunications venture that it expects, in the style of MFS, will grow from a scrappy underdog into a leading contender in telephone, television and Internet communications.

The name of the venture is C-Tec Corp. of Princeton, N.J. The company’s main business unit, RCN Inc, is introducing consumers to “bundling” – a new method of buying telecommunications services. It’s a method that competitors will imitate.

RCN is a cable television operator. It provides local telephone service. It also is a long-distance telephone supplier. And it hooks consumers up to the Internet.

In other words, it the first company in the country with the equipment to meet all the telecommunications needs of an average consumer. That makes it the first company in the United States to sell the services as a package.

An apartment dweller in Boston, for example, can walk into the RCN “store” on Boylston Street, browse through the high-tech services and buy the whole bundle for a savings of about $200 a year, the company said.

RCN’s services are only available in parts of New York City and Boston, but the company expects to spread soon into Washington, D.C, and other sections of the congested Northeast.

“It’s all about choice, all about flexibility,” said David C. McCourt, C-Tec chairman and chief executive.

Like MFS, RCN sees its mission as becoming an alternative service to the Baby Bells and other established telecommunications firms in the estimated $190 billion residential market.

And, like MFS, RCN thinks that it will accomplish that mission by building its own facilities-cables, switching stations, etc, - and offering superior service.

“It’s a telecommunications revolution,” C-Tec declares on the cover of its annual report illustrated by a painting of the Boston tea party. But the boxes the patriots are dumping over the sides of boats are labeled Nynex, Bell Atlantic and Time Warner Cable. The similarities between MFS and C-Tec are not a coincidence.

McCourt is on the MFS Board of Directors, and James Q Crowe, MFS chairman and chief executive, is a member of the C-Tec board. Walter Scott Jr., Kiewit chairman, is on the boards of MFS and C-Tec along with a slate of other Kiewit executives.

Will RCN become the MFS of residential telecommunications?

“That’s clearly the goal,” Crowe said. “The potential is huge. In fact, the residential market is larger than the business oriented communication market that MFS focuses on.”

MFS builds fiber-optic networks in major business districts, supplying local, long-distance, high-speed data and Internet services to corporations. The company’s networks are in more than 50 U.S and international cities.

WorldCom Inc.’s planned $12 billion acquisition of MFS will make it one of the largest corporate mergers in U.S. history.

Crowe cautions that while RCN has the potential to be a market leader, “potential is not the same as realization”.

C-Tec is breaking new ground in the telecommunications industry, Crowe said. And when you break new ground, he said, you’re going to hit some rocks.

Those rocks can be government regulations, strategic moves by competitors or technical complications, he said.

“It’s not a matter of what problems they encounter, but how they solve those problems,” Crowe said.

“The key matter for C-Tec is to accommodate the rocks they are going to hit,” he said. “So far, they have been able to do that in tremendous fashion.”

In early August, C-Tec called off a corporate restructuring and the sale of three of its operating units in reaction to new and proposed government regulations.

McCourt said that in the late 1995 when TV assets were overpriced, C-Tec saw an opportunity to sell its cable television business. But first, C-Tec needed to restructure its company to qualify for a tax-free stock-for-stock swap. The restructuring involved spinning off C-Tec’s core telephone assets and selling miscellaneous business units.

Kiewit pledged $123 million toward buying three non-core units: Residential Communications Network Inc, a residential telecommunications company; Commonwealth Long-Distance, a reseller of long-distance telephone service; and C-Tec International, which holds a 40 percent interest in Megacable, a cable-television operator in Mexico.

Kiewit had already bought Residential Communications and was acquiring the other two businesses when C-Tec changed its mind.

First stock prices for cable TV assets had fallen during 1996, McCourt said.

Second, buyers were backing away because of a Treasury Department proposal to eliminate rules for shedding assets on a tax-free basis, known as a Morris Trust.

And third, the Telecommunications Act was adopted in February, eliminating government regulations and encouraging competition in the telephone and cable industries. New opportunities fell in C-Tec’s lap.

C-Tec bought back Residential Communications and arranged to pay an additional $27 million to Kiewit for Liberty Cable, a New Your cable operator the Omaha company bought earlier in the year.

“I would say, in a bit of a serendipitous way, we are in a better situation…I think than we were with the original deal,” McCourt said.

C-Tec is moving quickly, making deals with other telecommunications providers to expand and diversify its services.

The company will offer direct-satellite television in New York City under an agreement made last month with DirecTV Inc.

And C-Tec will extend its reach in Boston by using Boston Edison Co.’s20 miles of fiber-optic communication lines to deliver RCN’s services. In exchange, Boston Edison will offer through RCN alarm monitoring systems and what it calls energy management services, which would allow consumers to turn on or off their lights, heat and air conditioning using the telephone.

Through it all, MFS’ fiber-optic lines remain the high-tech backbone of RCN’s operations. C-Tec leases space on MFS cables to provide telecommunication services.

“We are a business communications company,” Crowe said. “We have facilities now in cities around the country. Business demand for communications is during the business day. That means we have extra capacity in the evenings. That capacity we make available to RCN. They take that capacity, and value… and sell (their) services to residential users. It’s a perfect fit for them and us.”

And where MFS doesn’t have cables, RCN leases from other companies or builds their own.

McCourt said C-Tec intends to spend $100 million next year installing cables and switches to deliver its services in New York and Boston.

“From there, we’ll ramp up pretty quickly,” McCourt said of increasing capital investments.

In Boston, C-Tec and Boston Edison estimate they will spend about $300 million to build a network that will reach the 1.6 million consumers in the Boston area.

McCourt has said it would take two years to wire half of the 50 cities in Boston Edison’s territory.

Although RCN is ahead of the pack, such a time lag could be damaging.

Within two years, said Fred Voit, and analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston, “everyone is going to be offering some kind of bundled service.”

And Voit thinks the high-tech infrastructure will cost more than estimated.

“I don’t know what $300 million is going to get you,” he said

Richard R. Jaros, president of Kiewit Diversified Group, said C-Tec has the ability to fund such an aggressive expansion. But if necessary, Kiewit would consider an additional investment in the company.

“We have about $350 million invested in it today” Jaros said. “I think C-Tec has access to the equity and capital markets and is viewed as an attractive investment for the markets.

Jaros said Kiewit has faith in McCourt’s abilities, describing him as “street-smart and a quick study” with a high energy level and knowledge about rapidly deploying technology and controlling costs.

“That’s just the kind of guy you need for such an ambitious undertaking,” he said.

Kiewit owns the controlling interest in C-Tec and 48.5 percent of C-Tec’s common stock. The stock, traded on the NASDAQ exchange, closed Friday at $23.62 ½ per share, down 75cents

Kiewit bought its controlling stake in October 1993 for $200 million. The assets, which included cable television operations in Michigan and New Jersey and a telephone company in Pennsylvania, were undervalued, according to Kiewit.

“C-Tec had some very attractive attributes as an investment vehicle,” Jaros said.

But the real reason for investing in C-Tec was to introduce a new version of MFS that focused on delivering services to the home.

“If MFS was successful in the business market, why not leverage that expertise in the residential market?” McCourt asked.

The road to investing in C-Tec began in the late 1980’s as MFS was expanding into major U.S. cities. When MFS entered Boston, it merged with Corporate Communications Network, a business-communications venture owned by McCourt. McCourt was named to the MFS board.

“I was a start-up, and they were moving quick,” McCourt said. “I met Jim Crowe and hit it off with him. I have the utmost respect for him.”

McCourt has a list of impressive credentials as well. Before starting CCN, his company designed and built about a dozen private telecommunications networks, including cable TV systems in Sacramento and Palo Alto, Cailf, and parts of New York. He also owned a television station in Grenada.

His background qualified him to lead another Kiewit venture, called McCourt Kiewit International, which began in 1991 designing and building hybrid cable and telephone networks in the newly deregulated environment of the United Kingdom.

Wile the company’s main objective was to tap into a lucrative residential market for telephone and cable services, there were ulterior motives, McCourt said.

Kiewit also wanted to learn more about the residential market, using the U.K. business as an educational experiment, he said.

For all their similarities, MFS appeals to a technologically sophisticated client base with the objective of saving money, Crowe said. C-Tec however, sells an entertainment product that must be made appealing to everyday consumers who don’t have a lot of discretionary income.

In the United Kingdom, Kiewit discovered that 1 percent to 2 percent of consumers had the propensity to switch their telephone service to an alternative carrier, while 15 percent would switch cable TV service, McCourt said.

In the United States, the potential for attracting customers in even greater, he said.

According to a recent study by the Yankee Group, 21.5 percent of U.S. consumers said they would switch their local phone service and 67.5 percent said they would change cable companies if offered a 10 percent to 15 percent discount.

RCN has about 40,000 customers in Boston and New York, starting with the 30,000-subscriber Liberty Cable firm in New York City. It is signing up customers at a rate of 500 per week, McCourt said.

Despite their similar technologies and entwined backgrounds, there are no plans to sell C-Tec to MFS or anyone else.

“Our philosophy is, ‘Let’s build good business and what will come, will come,’” said Jaros of Kiewit. “We’re long-term players and view C-Tec and what they are doing as a long-term opportunity to build value.”

MFS has it hands full growing aggressively to meet the changing technology and information needs of the business-Communications market, Crowe said. It has no intention of trying to be everything to everybody by entering an even larger residential market.

But, Crowe adds, no one knows what will happen in a few years.

“At this time, you may be asking McCourt at C-Tec if he will be buying MFS.”

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