SINGAPORE, 15 APRIL 2009 – United States-based communications company AT&T has announced plans to invest US$1 billion in its global expansion this year.
An undisclosed portion of the sum will go towards enhancing AT&T’s network infrastructure, which includes the deployment of subsea fibre optic cables, network nodes and additional capacity.
“Recent cable cuts in Europe and Asia have shown that greater resilience and rerouting capacity is always desirable,” said Collis Loh, country general manger, AT&T Singapore.
According to Loh, part of the investment will also be geared towards the expansion the portfolio of products and services offered at AT&T’s data centre in Singapore. The facility was set up in November last year as part of the company’s separate US$1 billion global investment for the year 2008.
The centre, which offers utility computing services, serves as AT&T’s Asia-Pacific hub and caters to the company’s customers across the region.
Regional expansion
According to Loh, AT & T is also looking to expand some of its services across the region. The company aims to promote its managed IP telephony and local area network (better known as LAN) services in China, India, Thailand and Malaysia. The company also expects to roll out its telepresence service in China later this year, and increase data centre hosting capacity in Hong Kong and Tokyo.
Loh could not elaborate on how AT&T intends to increase data centre hosting capacity, saying the company was “still evaluating different options”.
“The availability of the super Internet data centre in Singapore and the AT&T telepresence service in China are among the many milestones in our expansion roadmap that aims to strengthen the linkage between Asia Pacific and our comprehensive infrastructure in other parts of the world,” said Loh.
