HONG KONG--This year’s ITU Telecom World 2006 not only marks the global show’s first appearance outside Geneva, Switzerland, but also AT&T’s first appearance as an exhibitor.

While the company participated in past events by sending executives and providing speakers, this year, the U.S. telecom giant is showcasing AT&T Global Network in multiple ways – as a strong global provider of service to multinational corporations, a leading player in the Asia Pacific market and a provider of network disaster recovery options.

Prominent in AT&T’s stand at Asia World Expo is a diaster recovery container, flown in from London where it is on constant standby. The unit, which fits in the cargo hold of an airliner, can support 157 global points of presence in more than 140 cities on AT&T’s IP-MPLS network and be deployed virtually anywhere in the world within 24 hours, according to AT&T.

“We believe this is the only capability of this type in the industry,” said Ron Spears, senior vice president of business sales for AT&T Global Services. “We have had a lot of traffic from representatives of other governments whose countries are in disaster-prone areas. We have had conversations with the U.S. government about how to make this available. I think this experience has validated our thinking, and we will go back now and have those conversations again. It would be much easier to work with foreign governments if the U.S. government is the intermediary.”

AT&T’s ITU exhibit floor debut comes as the company has established itself as a premiere global services provider and on the heels of recent successs in AsiaPAC, including adding VietNam to its service territory and becoming the first foreign carrier to be licensed as a national and international long-distance provider in India, as of October. AT&T has invested $8.5 billion in the Asia Pacific market, said Steve Lowe, vice president of Asia Pacific for AT&T Global Services, adding three new MPLS nodes. AT&T holds a minority ownership in a managed service provider Shanghai Symphony – the only foreign ownership in a joint venture on the Chinese mainland--and operates foreign restricted companies in partnership with each of the two major operators in China--China Telecom and China Netcom--offering connectivity services.

China is now AT&T’s fastest growing market, Spears said, although India remains its largest.

While global competitors have tried to characterize AT&T as too focused on its domestic challenges of building out IPTV services to concentrate fully on global operations, Spears dismisses such comments as uninformed.

“They don’t understand the way the busienss was structured post-merger,” he said. “All of our enterprise business was put under one operation. The AT&T management team was retained, the AT&T network organization was maintained. We effectively subsumed whatever SBC was doing in the enterprise. We now have a consumer business that is based in San Antonio and an enterprise business that is based in New Jersey. The biggest initiative domestically is Uverse – well, our global expansion is our version of Uverse.”

Adding BellSouth improves AT&T’s balance sheet even further and adds to the company’s broadband footprint, Spears said. “We now cover 60% of the access footprint in the U.S. and some high percentage of U.S. multinationals have footprint in that area,” he said. “We can serve them with seamless transparency end-to-end with connectivity we have absolute control over.”

In addition AT&T will now have complete control of Cingular, whose GSM technology is primed for global use.

“We will use that mobility as another access option for enterprise customers,” Spears said. “From the enterprise perspective, mobility is not a business, it is a form of access.