Dorman: Telecom outlook is mixed

ATLANTA — AT&T Chairman and CEO David Dorman addressed a decidedly smaller audience than previous Supercomm events have seen with a mixture of dread and reserved optimism.

“In my 25 years in telecom, I’ve never seen investment dollars more difficult to come by — equity or debt,” Dorman said. Dorman referred somewhat jokingly to the industry’s “ever-receding imminent recovery,” noting how difficult it is for anyone to predict how and when the telecom sector will regain strength.

“The reality is that no one really knows,” he said. He discussed several of the industry’s woes — including fraud and debt, which he called “a defining characteristic of telecom” — before going on to outline AT&T’s own plans for enhancing and augmenting its network with IP, edge technologies and Wi-Fi, and investing in ways to improve the “customer experience.”

Specifically, AT&T is working to consolidate its legacy networks into a single global IP infrastructure -- an Multi Protocol Label Switching-based network over an intelligent optical core -- by 2005. In addition, the carrier will invest $500 million this year to reduce provisioning time and improve billing accuracy, among other initiatives, part of a previously announced $700 million investment to reduce cycle times and improve processes.

Regarding Wi-Fi, AT&T plans to extend corporate intranets to hotspots at airports and hotels. Also, AT&T expects to provide network-based, IP-VPN services that can be self-provisoned within one hour to frame relay customers within a year.

Dorman also addressed the issue of outsourcing, saying AT&T will increasingly look to outside vendors for technology innovation rather than cultivating that development in-house.

“The days of AT&T inventing Unix are over,” Dorman said.