AT&T announces trials for new initiative
AT&T has announced its initiative to phase out of its traditional TDM (Time-division multiplexing) and into wireless and Internet Protocol services. The company has decided to run trials in two southern towns. The towns are Carbon Hill, Alabama and West Delray Beach, Florida.
Carbon Hill is a town with about 2,000 residents and is known for its coal-mining history, and West Delray Beach is located on the east coast of Florida, close to Palm Beach.
AT&T has decided to make the switch because 70 percent of its residential customers have dropped traditional phone service for VoIP (voice over IP) or are using wireless. For the trials, AT&T wants to transition customers from TDM to its U-Verse wireline voice and Internet services, or to services offered by AT&T Mobility. From these trails, AT&T hopes to identify the technical, operational and logistical raised by the transition.
Verizon Communications also made an attempt to switch from TDM services after Hurricane Sandy hit the northeast and damaged parts of New York and New Jersey in 2012. The new wireless voice service is called Voice Link and didn’t go over well with the company’s customers. The main complaints were that the service didn’t provide an Internet connection, wasn’t available for fax systems and didn’t work with some alarm systems, including alarms used by the disabled or elderly.
If approved by the FCC, the trials would take several years to complete and are only the first steps towards transitioning from TDM to nationwide wireless services. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the company is expecting an annual revenue growth rate of 4 percent to 5 percent as a result of switching to more efficient wireless technologies. An example of the new technology is 4G LTE, which costs 50 percent less to build and deploy than the previous network technology, according to Stephenson. Additionally, AT&T predicts that moving from data centers to a cloud-based system will result in a 70 percent improvement in efficiency.
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