AT&T Press Release: Major Enhancements in New York

[Kenny]

10/23/2001

AT&T Wireless Completes First Phase of Major Enhancement New Equipment Expands Call Capacity and Quality

Redmond, WA -- In connection with its third quarter earnings announcement, AT&T Wireless (NYSE: AWE) said today that it had completed the first phase of a major enhancement of its New York area network and, as a result, substantially increased calling capacity and improved service quality.

The New York market was part of a comprehensive multi-vendor network equipment strategy that the company unveiled about two years ago. At that time, AT&T Wireless said that it planned to install new wireless equipment in a number of high-growth, high-use North American markets.

"AT&T Wireless was able to complete a major overhaul of its New York network on-time and within budget, thanks to the multi-vendor strategy we had in place," said Mohan Gyani, president of AT&T Wireless Mobility Services. "In a matter of months, we totally replaced our previous equipment with a new high-performing network that is scalable to support future growth, standardized and on a modular platform."

Gyani said that as part of the New York effort, the company installed 13 new switches, replaced base stations in more than 1,040 cell sites and commissioned a new transport network.

"Concurrent with the success of this effort," he said, "our New York network team has begun its most aggressive build-plan to date and expects to activate more than 400 new cell sites in the New York City area within a year."

The New York network overhaul was designed to continue to improve key network performance metrics by meeting or exceeding quality benchmarks in accessing the network and completing calls, maintaining call connections and improving voice clarity, according to Greg Slemons, executive vice president, wireless network services.

"We're proud that our efforts succeeded on all three fronts," said Slemons. "We are exceeding our network accessibility, retainability and voice quality goals as a total network, achieving scores in the high 90 percentile in all categories."

Slemons said the company completed its New York network enhancement just prior to the tragic events of September 11. "While the network experienced three times the normal call volumes, not one of our new switches went down because of the heavy call traffic," he said. "Throughout the crisis, the network remained on-line and performed well providing much needed emergency service to the agencies responding to the tragedy.

"We had cell sites out of service in lower Manhattan due to Verizon and power company service disruptions, said Slemons. "We deployed a dozen portable cell sites, redirected some antennas and added more than 600 new radios in lower Manhattan, which increased calling capacity by more than 1,800 simultaneous calls. In just one week, we had more voice paths in lower Manhattan than we had before the disaster."

AT&T Wireless said its multi-vendor equipment strategy continues to support its digital wireless network in other North American markets as well as its rollout of the world-standard next generation technology.

[KevinJames]

Kenny,

Nice post. I know NYC has been one of the biggest complaint-sources regarding ATT's wireless service. Hopefully this will turn that market around.

I've noted that a number of posts focus on the business side of ATT. Do you work for them? If so, its good to have an industry representative with us here. If not, still glad you're with us.

I have always been very happy with ATT's service.

Kevin

[Kenny]

No I don't work for nor represent any wireless company. I am however an AT&T Wireless user and have taken a keen interest in this field.

I'm a Computer Network Engineer and I'm very interested in both the business and technical side of things in the wireless world. I have worked on short projects for GTE Wireless (now Verizon), AirTouch (now Verizon), Sprint PCS, AT&T, Nextel, BellSouth Mobility, RCN and Hargray Communications and so I do have some insights into the back-end side of things.

I am not a Telco or Wireless Engineer but have been involved with setting up Client-Server systems to help Engineers to provision and manage switching networks via a GUI-based system as oppose to using Telnet command-line. These are very large digital cross-connect networks that are used to cross-connect and manage DS3, DS1, STS-1E and OC-n transmission facilities.

One interesting thing about certain hardware or firmware upgrades. There are cases where a certain type of hardware or firmware upgrade requires the network down for less than a second but it means cutting off connected calls. Legally, companies cannot do this if there is a 911 call. So, I have seen Engineers waiting at 2am in the morning for the NOC go ahead (ie, no current 911 calls) before such updates/hardware swap can be done. Well this is just an interesting story of things going on behind the scenes.

The behind the scenes stuff can be very interesting but very complicated.