BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- AT&T said today it is expanding its portfolio of Ethernet services with a new suite of solutions that provide the reliability, speed and reach of optical networks to meet the growing bandwidth requirements of businesses for interconnecting local area networks.

AT&T Ultravailable® Managed OptEring Service(SM) leverages Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) technology that gives customers highly available transport of data, packet video and voice over ring topologies, which uses sub 50 millisecond protection switching in case of a catastrophic event such as a fiber cut or link failure.

The service enables a business with multiple locations in a metropolitan area or campus environment to interconnect these sites as a private or virtual local area network. AT&T is the first carrier to market with a managed optical Ethernet service that supports any-to-any Local Area Network/Metropolitan Area Network (LAN/MAN) interconnections.

"These Ethernet services illustrate AT&T's commitment to continuously leverage the latest technology-such as optical networking-and to deliver end-to-end managed services that address the evolving requirements of our business customers," said Eric Shepcaro, AT&T vice president for application integration networking.

AT&T Corp.