What will AT&T’s $1 billion buy for businesses?

Mobile operator AT&T announced details of a $1 billion investment plan today. This money is going to be put towards improving the services that AT&T offers to its enterprise customers around the world. So what does a billion get you these days? Read on for more detail.

The broad strokes:

AT&T has offered five areas in which it is investing, but it can really be broken down into three:

1) Global
2) Network
3) Applications

Let’s have a quick look at each

Global – AT&T is looking to provide better services for businesses; both at home and abroad. So this won’t just be an America investment. Companies of all sizes, from SMEs in the States to multi-nationals, will be benefiting from this – including plans for additional sub sea cables to provide better service in the Caribbean and South America, and better communication performance from the US to both Asia Pacific and Europe.

Network – 4G and convergence are a major focus for the operator. Upgrading and expanding its current network coverage is a big priority, but also creating services around that like machine-to-machine communcations and better mobile performance.

Applications – the application push is focused on things that would be useful to businesses, like managed hosting, cloud-based services and unified comms.

Ron Spears, President and CEO of AT&T Business Solutions: “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. IP-based solutions and applications have become ever more important to companies aiming to take their productivity to a new level while transforming their operations to adapt to their customers’ changing needs.”

What we think?

This will make a total of around $4 billion that AT&T has invested in business services in the last 4 years. It’s a much needed boost for the operators business services – despite the fact that this area grew hugely last year, AT&T still saw its sales to business clients drop by over 5%.