AT&T (NYSE: T) has put the finishing touches on Subsea 7's global IP VPN network upgrade, one that will cover over 30 of the company's worldwide sites.
Subsea 7, a seabed-to-surface engineering, construction and services contractor to the global offshore energy industry, was driven to upgrade its network because it needed to consolidate all of its sites following its merger with Acergy last year.
Subsea 7's global network with AT&T spans various countries, including Australia, Brazil, Norway, the United States, Britain and Singapore.
By connecting the sites on one unified network that will serve over 12,000 employees worldwide, Subsea 7 said it "has enabled employees to work more collaboratively and productively, providing access to shared resources and business-critical enterprise applications across the organisation."
This contract is another proof point that AT&T is becoming a bigger competitive force in the global IP-based services market. Since 2007, the service provider has had a long-standing relationship with Subsea 7, providing WAN, hosting and global VPN services.
In Vertical Systems Group's (VSG) recent Global Ethernet Leaderboard, AT&T took the No. 5 spot, behind European-based players Colt (Nasdaq: COLT) and BT (NYSE: BT).
Rosemary Cochran, principal of VSG, said in an interview with FierceTelecom it's important for carriers like AT&T that want to be major international service providers to have network reach into key countries.
"AT&T has some plans for expansion and partnerships to get them a stronger international presence," she said. "They are pretty good in Europe and parts of Asia, but China and South America are the growth areas."
AT&T's emphasis on IP/VPN and Ethernet services, in particular, were evident in its Q2 2012 business services results.
Although the telco's overall business services declined 1.5 percent year-over-year to $9.1 billion, a factor it said was a result of declining legacy ATM and Frame Relay revenues as more companies migrate to IP/MPLS-based VPNs and Ethernet, strategic business services (i.e., Ethernet and cloud services) rose 13.5 percent year-over-year.
For more:
- see the release
Special report: Wireline in the second quarter of 2012
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