AT&T Corp. said Tuesday it has completed what it claims is the first U.S. coast-to-coast OC-192 (10G bits per second) IP (Internet Protocol) backbone and also announced it will more than double its Web hosting capacity this year with construction of seven more U.S. data centres and one in Asia.
Some providers put extra capacity in “hot spots” on the backbone and implement OC-192, AT&T spokesman Bill Hoffman said. Those same providers, however, utilize the OC-48 digital transmission standard, which runs at data rates of 2.5G bps (bits per second) in other less populous locales, he said. AT&T put in OC-192 coast-to-coast on its backbone so it runs at the higher data rate speed throughout. AT&T implemented most of it during the second half of 2000, he said.
AT&T is expected to open its next data center somewhere in the United States within the next month, said Chris Szodoray, a company spokeswoman. She would not disclose the location of the U.S. centre or the future Asian centre. Additional data centres could be opened elsewhere globally, she said.
AT&T opened two hosting centres in December, one in Secaucus, New Jersey, and another in Orlando, Szodoray said.
The company’s data centers are located on three continents. The locations include: New York; San Diego; Redwood City, Calif.; Middletown, Va.; Phoenix; Chicago, and Orlando. Internationally, AT&T has centers in Birmingham, England and Tokyo and Osaka in Japan. AT&T actually acquired its first center in San Diego in 1998, when it bought Teleport Communications Group and acquired its CERFNnet data centre.
The data centres can offer bandwidth on demand, managed hosting centres, application management, network and bandwidth management, and hardware and operating system management, Szodoray said. The Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based company also can provide database management, storage services, managed security and firewall services, and intelligent content and distribution, she said.
AT&T Corp., based in Basking Ridge, N.J., is at http://www.att.com/.