| AT&T and Excite@Home recently announced an agreement to serve the advanced needs of Internet content providers through several high-speed, dedicated Internet access services. Together the two companies will jointly market, provision and maintain high-speed, dedicated Internet access services via both AT&T and Excite@Home’s industry-leading IP backbones.
This alliance will offer content providers optimized delivery to nearly three million Excite@Home broadband subscribers. For the first time customers will benefit from a single point of contact between the providers of two carrier-class networks. Services from this joint initiative are scheduled to be made generally available within the second quarter of this year.
This joint initiative benefits content providers in three ways:
• High availability via a managed multi-homing service which delivers simultaneous connectivity to the backbones of both companies.
• The development of inter-backbone service level agreements including a 100% network availability performance objective for the multi-homed access services, and
• A single point of customer contact for the provider’s content delivery needs.
“With the ability to simultaneously connect to both the AT&T and Excite@Home backbones, customers now have the added confidence that their online events will run without a hitch,” said Mike Jenner, vice president, general manager of AT&T Internet Connectivity Services. “Working together we’ve got it all — the industry’s top performing IP backbone*, the fastest connectivity services commercially available, more than a million square feet of web hosting space and millions of broadband end-users.”
With the increasing usage of rich media — such as audio and video — over the Internet, content providers are recognizing the importance of having resilient and scalable dedicated Internet access services. By simultaneously connecting to the high-speed IP backbones of both networks, content providers can deliver an optimized end-user experience. | 
