AT&T to scale up operations in India, China

Telecommunication Services provider AT&T plans to invest about a billion dollars in 2010 to upgrade its services and products, besides expanding global network in countries like India, China and Japan.

The 2010 investment programme for businesses, part of AT&T's overall existing capital plan, includes scaling application services, and enhancing small businesses.

AT&T also plans to increase broadband speeds up to 24 Mbps downstream where possible in more than 120 markets across AT&T's 22-state US footprint.

As part of the global network expansion, the phone company would deploy, upgrade or add diverse IPv6-capable MPLS nodes to support Layer 3 VPN and Global Managed Internet Services, including gigabit ethernet customer access across multiple locations in Europe and Asia Pacific.

These would include countries like Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Brazil, Canada and Mexico.

AT&T would also install additional telepresence rooms in AT&T offices in Europe as well as Bangalore and Hinjewadi in India.

"Despite the continuing challenges of today's economic environment, we continue to deliver on our commitment to provide companies with the network-centric capabilities and applications they need to enhance their operations," AT&T business solutions president and CEO Ron Spears said.

Including this year's planned investment, AT&T will have invested more than four billion dollars since 2006 in business-focused network, systems and applications to provide services to the more than 3.5 million business customers it serves.