This morning AT&T announced plans to invest $1 billion in 2009 to continue building out its global network along with "driving" new services and applications for businesses. Network-based applications such as managed hosting, content delivery and management, and telepresence seem to be the business-focused watchwords of the day.
New infrastructure includes new undersea cable capacity to Alaska, Australia, Asia Pac, India, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and on trans-Atlantic routes to Europe. There's a multi-year commitment to IPv6 and plans to grow global backbone capacity by deploying more 10 GB edge equipment, increasing backbone bandwidth and adding more big-iron Cisco CRS1 routers on key routes.
Adding it all up, AT&T says it will have spent $3 billion since 2006 on "business-focused" networks, systems and apps. Applications enhancements include additions to AT&T's VPN, WAN, UC, hosting, applications performance and digital media solutions. Telepresence in China and managed IP telephony and LAN services in China, India, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Mexico also get bullet points.
AT&T also plans to increase data center hosting capacity in the U.S., Hong Kong, Tokyo and the United Kingdom, along with scaling the company's Synaptic Hosting platform in "super" data centers in Singapore, Amsterdam and three sites within the U.S. Companies will be able to get more on-net managed apps at the super data centers, such as Oracle and SAP.
For more:
- AT&T clarifies capex spend in '09. Release.
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