AT&T Lighting Up Michigan Business Buildings

LANSING (WWJ) -- AT&T said Monday that it's lighting up businesses at a rapid clip these days.

So far, the company said, its service crews have installed fiber optic cable to an additional 117 multi-tenant buildings across Michigan, making fiber-based broadband services available to more than 3,000 business customer locations.

The effort is part of AT&T's Project Velocity IP (VIP), a three-year investment plan to expand and enhance the company's wireless and wireline IP broadband networks, including deploying its fiber network to an additional 1 million business customer locations in its wireline service area by year-end 2015.

Under the fiber to the building program, Michigan businesses in these AT&T Fiber Ready Buildings have access to an expanded array of security, network and cloud-based services, all of which ride on the fiber network. Included is improved ability to upload and download large data files and images, share large files with remote employees or customers, back up data in the cloud, and videoconference with suppliers, business partners and customers.

The services are especially beneficial to businesses that regularly handle huge files such as medical images, illustrations, videos, engineering designs, and large presentation decks.

AT&T Fiber Ready buildings provide reliable, secure access to cloud, virtual private network and voice over IP services. They also offer options for adding equipment to enhance in-building wireless coverage and speeds and high-speed internet access over Ethernet with upload and download speeds of up to one gigabit per second.

"By offering faster upload and download speeds, generally available to only large businesses, AT&T Fiber Ready buildings can take small and medium businesses to the next level," said Jim Murray, president, AT&T Michigan. "Fiber-based wired and wireless services bring the world to our business customers, but, just as important, they also help bring these customers to the world."

The program also offers benefits to property owners and managers, including more appeal to potential tenants by providing access to the most advanced telecommunications services and deployment of fiber-based electronic equipment that can serve multiple tenants, streamlining the installation process and minimizing disruption.

For more information about AT&T's fiber to the building program, please visit: www.att.com/fiberreadybuilding.

Last November, AT&T launched Project VIP, a three-year investment plan that includes the deployment of more than 10,000 macro sites, more than 1,000 distributed antenna systems, and more than 40,000 small cells by year-end 2015. The expansion will cover more than 300 million Americans with AT&T 4G LTE by the summer of 2014, and grow the fiber network to reach 1 million additional business customer locations by year-end 2015.