Lucent's credit rating has been slashed four times since last October, most recently to a notch just above junk bond status.
Many companies have short-term debt facilities that have to be renegotiated every year.
Normally this is perfunctory. It just so happens that Lucent's particular struggles . . . Once an icon whose growth seemed boundless, Lucent has become a symbol of times that have turned nasty. Markets that once gave money to seemingly any telecommunications company now surrender it to almost no one lately. Many of the start-up companies that have bought billions of dollars worth of equipment from companies such as Lucent, Nortel Networks Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. have cut their spending sharply, reducing revenue all along the production chain.