AT&T opens two Internet data centers

(Telephony) AT&T has opened two more Internet data centers, one in the New York metro area, the other in Orlando, Fla. The two new centers give the company 13 such centers and more than 1 million square feet of Web-hosting space worldwide.

In addition, eight additional data centers will be open by the end of 2001, with the first coming on line within a month and another to be located in Asia.

The build-out is phase two in a three-year, $2 billion joint effort with British Telecom and Concert that calls for the construction of 44 data centers in 16 countries. AT&T indicated that the data centers built this year will be spread more or less evenly across the U.S. Currently, the company has 10 data centers in the U.S., one in England, and two in Japan.

The data centers connect directly to the company’s IP backbone and its high-speed private-data networks. They are designed to provide co-location, Web-hosting, application, and networking professional services.

"We have been in the hosting business since 1998, and the Internet Data Center has been part of that plan since we entered the game,” said a company spokesperson. “We view our data centers as the next-generation central office. The data centers will be where business takes place. It’s not just about your Web site. It’s also about bringing your back office operations into our data centers.”

In addition to the data center build-out, the company announced that its coast-to-coast OC-192 (10 Gb/s) Internet protocol backbone is up and running. The backbone links form two paths across the U.S., connecting Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco, and provide a powerful transmission vehicle. The high-speed circuits are able to transmit from coast to coast, in less than two minutes, a data file equal in size to last year’s top 25 box-office, according to the company.