AT&T Unveils Industry’s First Service to Allow Customers to Provision Optical Bandwidth on Demand

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) today announced a new service that permits enterprise and wholesale customers to take direct and unprecedented control over their network with the ability to reallocate bandwidth as needed by increasing or decreasing capacity in real time. AT&T’s Optical Mesh Service is the first of its kind to allow customers to build and self-administer their own SONET network using the award-winning AT&T BusinessDirect® customer portal. Today’s announcement represents the latest in a series of initiatives by the company to drive new product portfolio offers to a broader base of business customers, post-merger.

The service is available now in 220 locations nationwide, enabling customers to speed bandwidth capacity to support data and applications to any pre-defined location on their network, when needed, and to seamlessly integrate networked applications and services in real time. The service is powered by AT&T’s Intelligent Optical Network, a self-healing network that connects multiple offices and locations on a single network and provides 99.999 percent availability, as well as proactive network management and maintenance.

AT&T Optical Mesh Service is especially beneficial as business customers increasingly rely on their networks to power revenue-generating applications, such as e-commerce and other platforms. Businesses large and small regularly need to reallocate bandwidth to priority applications in response to changing business conditions.

"In today’s dynamic IT environment, enterprise customers across the U.S. face the daunting task of trying to plan for the unforeseen," said Nick Maynard, senior analyst, Communications Network Infrastructure, the Yankee Group. "With today’s service announcement, AT&T offers its clients an on-demand optical solution for continuity and mission-critical business applications and gives AT&T the ability to further leverage its optical network investment while presenting a clear service differentiation in this space."

Bandwidth-demand growth — driven by the increasing use of Web services, as well as business continuity and disaster recovery efforts and the need to link regional branch offices — is forcing enterprises to re-evaluate their network infrastructures to provide for greater adaptability. AT&T has responded to this trend by delivering the industry’s first service that gives customers the freedom to determine how they want to structure their networks for optimum control and business value.

"This new service puts the power and reach of the AT&T network directly into the hands of customers, enabling unprecedented control over how they choose to route network traffic and increase or decrease the amount of bandwidth needed at any time," said Sandy Brown, vice president, Business Services, AT&T. "We’ve designed this service with all of our business customers in mind — from retailers that require more bandwidth as they gear up for the holiday shopping season to manufacturers and other industry players that rely on flexible networks to respond instantly to changing business needs."

Customers can provision additional network capacity with rates up to OC48 and industry-leading connection speeds with the click of a mouse via AT&T’s award-winning customer portal, AT&T BusinessDirect.

About AT&T

AT&T Inc. is one of the world’s largest telecommunications holding companies and is the largest in the United States. Operating globally under the AT&T brand, AT&T companies are recognized as the leading worldwide providers of IP-based communications services to business and as leading U.S. providers of high speed DSL Internet, local and long distance voice, and directory publishing and advertising services. AT&T Inc. holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless, which is the No. 1 U.S. wireless services provider with 58.7 million wireless customers.