AT&T’s marriage of its business solutions and mobility groups reflects the union of its wireline and wireless businesses. The carrier has already merged its wireless and wireline network operations. Through its Project Velocity IP, AT&T is investing $6 billion in wireline initiatives and $8 billion in wireless projects through the end of 2015, and for business customers these investments are creating complementary services.
Fixed mobile convergence (FMC) is the term AT&T uses to describe the unified communications that can be offered through wireline and wireless service from the same provider. The carrier says that some business customers may face higher-than-expected costs for mobile service as more employees rely on smartphones and tablets to get work done. AT&T offers business customers solutions that route certain mobile calls through the wireline infrastructure to cut costs. On the flip side, unified communications can mean that calls originated on a fixed line can be moved to a mobile device without interruption.
Fiber is a major part of AT&T’s wireline investment. The carrier is expanding its fiber network to reach an additional 1 million business customer locations by the end of 2015. Its goal is to bring fiber to half the business buildings in its wireline service area that have six or more tenants. Fiber supports faster Internet speeds, as well as small cell and distributed antenna system installations in some of these buildings.
“With IP-based services and a fully converged network to carry them, customers in the near future will no longer have to associate specific applications with specific devices or network connections,” AT&T wrote in a recent blog post. “A full range of information and content will be accessible via a single device, and the intelligent network will deliver it over the best available connection at a given place and time.”
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