AT&T announces $1 billion global business, network expansion

AT&T announced on Tuesday that it will be investing $1 billion USD into the expansion of its global network presence, as well as scalable business applications and services.

“Despite the continuing challenges of today’s economic environment, we continue to deliver on our commitment to provide companies with the network-centric capabilities and applications they need to enhance their operations,” said Ron Spears, President and CEO of AT&T Business Solutions.  “IP-based solutions and applications have become ever more important to companies aiming to take their productivity to a new level while transforming their operations to adapt to their customers’ changing needs.”

The network expansion portion of AT&T’s investment is primarily concerned with inter-continental bandwidth and international deployments. Under the plan, the company will add or upgrade IPv6-enabled nodes to significantly expand bandwidth and services in:

• Europe: Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain and Sweden.
• Asia Pac: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam.
• C&LA: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Panama and Peru.

With respect to trans-oceanic cabling, the firm intends to expand the capacity of these long haul lines, as well as improve the route diversity and redundancy of these vital connections with:

• 180G of new capacity into the Caribbean and South America.
• Over 350G of new capacity from the US to and within Asia Pacific.
• 70G of capacity from the U.S. to Europe.
• IPv6 capable MPLS core routers in Hawaii and Guam to provide an interconnection point for Transpacific cables between the U.S., Australia, Singapore, China and Japan.

Finally, AT&T confirmed that it will continue to improve terrestrial capacity in the firm’s 22-state US market presence by deploying additional Ethernet over copper and metro switched Ethernet services. The domestic and international improvements will eventually enable AT&T to provide additional applications and capabilities whilst simultaneously streamlining its Ethernet portfolio.