DIDIER LOMBARD, the portly 64-year-old engineer who heads France Telecom, has some unusual tricks up his sleeve. One is Columba, a “bracelet phone” that uses GPS technology to help locate the wearer. It is intended to help families keep track of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

“You can get them back in a few minutes,” he said. “It gives liberty to people who are loved.”

Clever phrases aside, more central to his strategy for developing the slow-growing telephone company is Orange, the mobile business that the French giant bought six years ago.

The £30 billion purchase almost bankrupted the group but it has increasingly relied on Orange to maintain forward progress.

Orange’s central role in France Telecom’s future was greatly expanded this month when the brand was extended to cover the Wanadoo internet arm and other businesses. Customers in Britain and France are no longer offered broadband from Wanadoo but from Orange instead. It is free to mobile customers spending more than £30 a month on a contract. The package of services also includes landline calls.

That is just a start. Coming soon will be Orange TV, offering programmes on demand. That builds on the mobile- television service already available to Orange customers with advanced “3G” handsets.

Orange, once the most ardent believer in a mobile or “wirefree” future, will thus become Europe’s leading example of a “converged” communications and entertainment company.

It is far from alone in this. NTL, the cable-television company, is in the process of buying Virgin Mobile to add to its existing package of broadband and telephony services. O2 last week spent £50m to buy Be, a small but sophisticated broadband firm. BT, BSkyB and even Vodafone are all making their own moves to embrace this converging world.

The strategy also has its critics, however. Some fear that the demand for bundles of converged services is more apparent than real. In a report last week, Dan Gardiner of Bridgewell, a broker, said: “We believe this convergence is being pushed by the industry rather than demand by the consumer.

“Mass-market adoption will require simple services delivered at a significant discount. In our view current plans are a long way from delivering ready-to-use services. There are opportunities, but we are concerned that current investment plans may substantially overestimate the potential rewards.”

So is Orange up to the job of reviving France Telecom? There are plenty of sceptics. Many believe the brand has lost much of its freshness as the mobile firm has been steadily subsumed into the civil service-like culture of its parent and its 200,000 employees.

Recent results and market research lend some support to this view. Customer churn (or turnover) has risen markedly, and, according to a recent study by JD Power, a research firm, Orange has lost some of the edge it once enjoyed in keeping customers happy, particularly on pre-pay.

Weakening profit margins suggest that Orange has had to spend heavily on handset upgrades and other incentives to hang on to many of its 15m UK customers.

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