AT&T Offers Sonet Control

BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T - News) 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."

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T)