AT&T* announced today it has received the distinction of the 2010 North American Market Share Leadership of the Year Award in MPLS IP VPN Service. This Frost & Sullivan Award was presented to AT&T for demonstrating excellence within its industry, by strategically investing its resources to tap the market potential for layer 3 VPN Services.

Frost and Sullivan highlights multiple factors attributing to AT&T's emergence as a distinct market leader: AT&T is the largest domestic MPLS IP VPN service provider, AT&T's global VPN network offers any-to-any connectivity, the breadth of AT&T's network footprint— including its local loop assets, and AT&T's VoIP addition to its network solutions.

The size of AT&T's MPLS network is unparalleled:

• AT&T's MPLS Network service is available in 181 countries with 3,800 + nodes
• AT&T has approximately 320,000 MPLS customer ports worldwide
• AT&T is the largest MPLS IP VPN service provider in US markets

"AT&T MPLS services provide businesses with high-quality, tightly managed private IP platforms that enable them to efficiently consolidate disparate voice and data applications together without compromising security and reliability," said Dale McHenry, VP of Enterprise Networks at AT&T. "Customers use our high-performance MPLS networks to deliver innovative, financially attractive capabilities to their end users – things like inter-company Telepresence, enterprise Voice-over-IP solutions, and remote worker connectivity."

According to Frost & Sullivan, there is much growth potential in U.S. MPLS IP VPN services. Customers are only starting to realize the cost benefits of moving their voice, data, and video applications to a single IP-based network, as compared to running three different expensive networks for each of these applications. The MPLS IP VPN service segment will expand as businesses migrates to MPLS IP VPNs to take advantage of the network's ability to support traffic prioritization through class of services, and increasing focus on network and application performance monitoring tools.