It is the third straight year that Frost & Sullivan named AT&T as the top provider in the carrier Ethernet space, and this year's award recognizes AT&T's leadership in metro and long-haul Ethernet services.

Frost & Sullivan recognized AT&T for its achievement of a leading position in the industry through a combination of strategies to penetrate existing markets, strategic acquisitions to enter new markets and a broad portfolio of offerings.

"Furthermore, AT&T has continually demonstrated solutions for monitoring market changes and for implementing superior market strategies," said Roopashree Honnachari, senior industry analyst, Information and Communication Technologies – North America, for Frost & Sullivan. "Frost & Sullivan believes that the carrier Ethernet services market has entered the growth phase, with demand for these services increasing rapidly. AT&T, with its broad portfolio of offerings, extended footprint and in-depth knowledge of different vertical markets is in a unique position to tap the market potential."

The award was based on a review of proprietary data sources, interviews with industry experts and Frost & Sullivan's evaluation of competitors' revenue growth, profitability and market and technology innovation. The specific achievements by AT&T cited by Frost & Sullivan include AT&T's recent expansion of metropolitan area Ethernet services from 13 states to 22 states through its 2006 acquisition of BellSouth and the successful expansion of its Managed Internet Service Ethernet access from 17 cities to more than 100 cities. Other factors recognized by Frost & Sullivan included the addition of more speeds for AT&T's OPT-E-MAN® service, the company's use of Ethernet-over-copper services to serve small- and medium-size businesses, and AT&T's retail and wholesale carrier Ethernet services, which encompass access, E-Line, and E-LAN.

AT&T's Ethernet Solutions provide customers with highly efficient, cost-effective solutions for communicating across multiple locations within a metropolitan area. The services are ideal for organizations that want to link buildings in a metropolitan area through broadband connections in order to share information across employees, customers and suppliers and other users. These solutions also provide expanded service levels that will give businesses a wider selection in the type of service level they want and support bandwidths ranging from 2 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

AT&T Ethernet Solutions can be configured in a variety of ways, including point to point, point to multipoint and multipoint to multipoint. Today, businesses use metropolitan Ethernet services for a variety of connectivity options, such as dedicated access to the Internet; global access to a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) platform; private line access to a managed area network or wide area network; network access via SONET or DWDM rings; or switched access to a Virtual Private Network.-AT&T