* AT&T gets ready to spend a billion dollars on global infrastructure
After the much-publicized cuts of undersea Internet cables, AT&T this week announced that it would spend $1 billion this year on, among other things, undersea Internet cables.
This is no doubt a good idea. AT&T named several locations in particular – locations that it calls “key markets” – where it plans to add fiber-optic cable capacity, including routes leading to Japan, Asia and Australia. It also plans to upgrade the cables in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, and to upgrade cables serving India and the Middle East. AT&T says the investments “will be used to extend AT&T’s intelligent optical network into Europe and Asia with optical mesh restoration.”
To put the $1 billion in perspective, AT&T says it is 33% more than last year’s enterprise investment and more than twice the spending in 2006.
The increase really doesn’t need much explanation; as you might expect, AT&T talks about the high growth in IP traffic that it wants to support. It is also a part of AT&T’s effort to extend its global reach.
The billion dollars isn’t just for undersea cables; it’s also for core MPLS routers in Europe, Asia and here in the U.S., as well as new or additional MPLS-based IP network access nodes in Paris, Moscow, Kuwait, India, Japan, Asia and Central America. Plus, new network-to-network connections will extend AT&T’s reach in India, Australia, Eastern Europe and South America.
Then there’s the rollout of a “global virtual private local area network solution,” which will hurt your brain if you think too much about a “global… local” network. AT&T plans to have Ethernet network capabilities in 39 countries by the end of the year.
As I mentioned previously, if nothing else, the recent cable cuts highlighted the global scope and the vulnerabilities of the Internet. One would expect moves like AT&T’s to become more common as the Internet shrinks the world even further.
