AT&T specified where it intends to spend approximately $1 billion of the $18 billion it projects to spend this year on capital expenditures (capex) – on beefing up its global network, including its content delivery platforms.
AT&T had previously announced, during its quarterly financial call, that it would be pulling back on capex spending in 2009 by 10 to 15 percent, to about $20 billion spent in 2008. AT&T acknowledged the cutback will slow the rollout of U-verse.
As for its plans for the $1 billion, since 2007 AT&T has been expanding its global resources in a partnership with IBM, and at least some of the $1 billion AT&T is tabbing for its global build-out will be dedicated to projects that partnership is working on. This network largely serves business customers.
AT&T said it “is capitalizing on the ongoing shift in network traffic from voice to data and video — and more importantly to IP-based data and video — as customers migrate from legacy data networks to MPLS-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and managed applications.”
The $1 billion is going to be spread among a large number of projects:
- Extending the AT&T Intelligent Content Distribution Service reach into Mexico, and enhancing service in high-growth areas such as Brazil, India and China. Plans also call for expansion of capacity in existing service countries and jurisdictions in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. This expansion will cover services such as Flash, Windows Media Format, Move Networks and Silverlight that support large file downloads and video formats. AT&T is also expanding its SSL security capabilities.
- Enhancements and additions to AT&T’s VPN portfolio, wide area network (WAN), telepresence, unified communications (UC), hosting, applications performance and digital media solutions.
- AT&T Telepresence service availability in China.
- Managed IP telephony and local area network (LAN) services in China, India, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Mexico.
- Increasing data center hosting capacity in Atlanta, Annapolis, Md., and the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area in the United States, as well as in Hong Kong, Tokyo and the United Kingdom.
- Scaling the AT&T Synaptic Hosting platform in super IDCs in Singapore, Amsterdam and three sites within the United States.
- Accelerated deployment of mobile conferencing solutions, portal capabilities and business mobility applications for companies of all sizes in vertical industries like finance, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, education and government.
- AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications platform for enterprises to efficiently and securely develop, deploy and support enterprise applications. This will build on AT&T’s alliance with Antenna Software and will expand by adding business workflows that mobilize key enterprise processes.
- Enterprise On Demand (EOD), the company’s service delivery platform for customers to flexibly self-manage large wireless data deployments of specialized vertical devices.
- Fixed-mobile convergence capabilities, building on AT&T’s Mobile Extension service announced earlier this year.
There are many more projects specified, including the deployment of new sub-sea, fiber-optic cable capacity to Alaska, Australia, Asia Pac, India, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and on trans-Atlantic routes to Europe.