AT&T Corp. has just announced it has been awarded a three-year contract by The
Home Depot valued at more than $100 million, to provide integrated network connection service, voice and frame relay services.
The Home Depot (HD) has already been using Integrated Network Connection Service in more than 30 of its stores in several states to support in-store applications, such as customer credit validation and inventory management. All of the approximately
900 Home Depot stores will be using INCS by mid-2000.
INCS supports up to 24 voice calls and over 1.2 Mbps of Frame Relay or IP traffic on one T1. To dynamically allocate bandwidth, the service uses voice compression and an AT&T-operated Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) multiplexer located on the customer’s premises.
“With AT&T providing the equipment on our premises, we’ve been able to forget about the technology piece of it and really focus on the business benefit,” said Dan Haumann, Home Depot network services manager.
“The type of applications that we’re going to be able to put in the store environment over the next couple of years is just mind-boggling.”
AT&T (T) announced INCS in January. The service lowers network costs, simplifies
network management and provides customers a “future-proof” evolution to
packet voice. INCS also provides businesses with a simple “plug and play” interface that automatically devotes enough bandwidth to wherever it’s needed as the type of traffic and demands on the network fluctuate.
The service works with existing customer premises equipment and combines voice, frame relay and IP traffic on business networks.
