AT&T to network more cities in India

NEW DELHI: Upbeat about the Indian networking business, US based networking major — AT&T Communication services India is planning to expand its AT&T Global Network (AGN) nodes within the country. With an investment outlay of close to $1.5million, it is about to start its fourth such node in Chennai.

"Sheer demand for our solutions in this part of the world is helping us expand our network in this region. We would be commencing this Chennai node by the end of this year. At present, we have about 350 customers in the Indian region and of this, around 15 are based in the Chennai region. This new node is aimed at addressing the networking requirements for these customers," explained General Manager AT&T Business Services India, Sanjiv Bhagat.

The company is doing this as part of a bigger expansion plan to add six nodes to its worldwide AGN. "Out of these 6-5 would be based in the Asian region, 3 in China, one in Thailand and one in Chennai. All these nodes would be functional by the first quarter of next year. Asian region and India is highly important to us in terms of business growth as last year our revenues from the Asian pacific region grew by about 15 percent," informed regional public relations director at AT&T Asia Pacific Group, Greg Brutus.

Presently, the company has three functional nodes located at New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Moving forward, the company would also be seriously looking at further expanding its node network in the Indian region. "We would like to expand our node network based on the business dynamics and requirement of the market. Cities like Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata are surely on our radar and we would like to review having a node in each of these cities based on the number of customers that we acquire," Bhagat added.