Telecom giant rolls out new wireless service for businesses
AT&T Wednesday announced that it has launched a handful of new services and capabilities that marry its wireless and wireline assets.
The carrier is offering multi-service bundles, wireless to VPN support and on-net rates for wireless callers.
Just over 90 days ago, AT&T closed its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth. That purchase gave AT&T full ownership of Cingular Wireless, now part of “the new AT&T.” In that time carrier has been working to integrate all lines of business, says Bill Archer, senior vice president of product management.
AT&T is now offering small business customers a “quadruple-play” package of wireless, local, long distance and DSL. Customers are offered a single bill and can expect to reduce their monthly service costs when they purchase all four services, Archer says. But he wouldn’t offer specific cost saving figures, instead he says it depends on which services are selected and number of locations supported.
The carrier is also offering a similar package for midsize and large enterprise customers as part of its AT&T Business Network (ABN). Customers can now purchase any wireless service or device and have that monthly spend count toward their total annual revenue commitment. AT&T is also actively working on integrating its billing systems with legacy Cingular’s billing system. Archer says customers can expect to have bill integration, which will result in a single invoice, by 2008.
AT&T is able to offer a single bill for small business customers because AT&T and Cingular were jointly selling services to small business users before the merger. A single invoice was part of that offering.
The carrier also added two new wireless features to its ABN package of services. The features are mobile termination and cellular access to corporate VPNs.
Mobile termination lets customers pay on-net, landline rates, for all calls to wireless phone numbers, which that corporation owns. Corporate wireline per-minute calling rates are still less expensive than wireless per-minute calling rates. To support this feature, AT&T loads all corporate AT&T wireless phone numbers into a database. This database recognizes when someone from headquarters, also on AT&T’s landline network, is calling an employee on a wireless phone. The call is then billed at the landline rate vs. the wireless rate.
AT&T also introduced a new client for its Remote Access customers this week that now supports cellular access to corporate VPNs. Before, customers had the choice of accessing their corporate network remotely from around the globe using dial-up, Wi-Fi via 48,000 hotspots or Ethernet access, Archer says. Now cellular broadband is also an option.
“It’s a very simple and intuitive interface that’s self explanatory,” Archer says. AT&T offers cellular wireless data service roaming in 125 countries globally.
Legacy Cingular’s 3G wireless data network is based on High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology. HSDPA can support download speeds between 400K and 700Kbps on average and bursts as fast as 1Mbps.
The carrier is also launching its NetGate service that lets remote offices connect to their corporate VPN using an AT&T designed wireless router. This service lets multiple users in one office use AT&T wireless broadband data service to access their corporate network. This service would be used instead of DSL, cable modem, Ethernet or other fixed broadband service.
