AT&T is taking an approach to serving new office parks within its 22-state local franchise territory that gets the company in on the ground floor--or lower.

The AT&T Business SmartMoves program builds on relationships with major contractors to design telecom facilities for new office park complexes before they are built, based on predicted tenant requirements. This month, AT&T broke ground on the latest and one of the largest of its AT&T Business SmartMoves, the DuPage National Technology Park in West Chicago, a suburban community in DuPage County. The goal is to have state-of-the-art, high-bandwidth facilities available from day one.

“In today’s world, it’s not just about location. It’s about connectivity, speed and bandwidth,” said Fred Reynolds, senior vice president of development, CenterPoint Properties, in a prepared statement. “AT&T is laying the groundwork, infrastructure, and connectivity for applications that will accommodate the demanding bandwidth and communications needs of businesses in the DuPage National Technology Park now and in the future.”

In addition, AT&T officials said the company is making plans to take its approach to serving office parks national, reaching into service territories outside its local franchise.

At the heart of the AT&T Business SmartMoves process is the relationship with the contractor--in this case, CenterPoint Properties--and the assignment of a single point of contact within AT&T for the project.

There is no exclusivity to the deal--tenants can still opt to use other service providers--but by having the appropriate facilities available from the outset, AT&T counts on having a competitive edge, and believes its contractor partners benefit as well.

“If you think about a business development that some developer is working on, their customers span many sizes and industries,” said Mike Welch, vice president of AT&T Business SmartMoves. “Typically we segment our customers by size, industry type and other characteristics and assign the account team that fits that customer. If all we did was go with our normal customer segmentation model, then a big office park development would just look like a bunch of individual customers. If all we did was go with the normal customer segmentation model, a big office park development would just look like a bunch of individual customers.”

As a result, some of the companies that would typically move into a technology park such as the one in West Chicago would be substantially underserved for large-scale data center operations, Welch said.

“SmartMoves provides a single point of contact from AT&T to the developer so they have one person to bring questions or concerns or ideas to, and that one person can work all the internal business within our company to get things done and come back to the developer with one voice,” he explained. “From the contractor’s point of view, one of the primary benefits is one network infrastructure bill. This may be a cornfield that is empty now. But the contact person will coordinate with our network organization, and let them know this is more than a cornfield, this is more than one customer that is going to sit here – this project needs fiber, needs diverse routes in and out of office park because the customers that are going to be occupying this park will require it. We make sure that core infrastructure is built according to the needs of development.”

AT&T has signed agreements with major contractors nationwide, and those builders will bring AT&T in early, Welch said, because it enables them to have office parks equipped from the outset with state-of-the-art facilities to be more competitive in the real estate market. In turn, the developers share with AT&T information about tenants as they are signed, letting the telecom provider tailor the way it builds its facilities and be better prepared to serve those tenants.

“If the developer knows who the tenants are going to be, they will know what type of networks or what amount of bandwidth or what amount of diversity they are going to want,” he said. “The more we know ahead of time the more we can tailor.”

In the case of the DuPage National Technology Park, AT&T has been engaged since 1999, when the project discussions began, said Jim Massel, regional director of Business SmartMove. The developer, CenterPoint is marketing the park “as the most state-of-the-art technology park of its kind,” he said. “You’ve got major research labs, companies with significant data center needs they are putting on that facility. You can’t find many places that would require a more robust network than what that does.”

Working together, CenterPoint and AT&T made sure the park topology fit the telecom infrastructure it would require, including adjusting roads and easements. The two companies also are jointly marketing the park in business journal ads that bill it as a state-of-the-art facility built by CenterPoint and powered by AT&T.

“By using AT&T’s technology and infrastructure, we are able to provide unparalleled benefits of high-capacity broadband lines in addition to a suite of other communications services,” said Reynolds, also in a prepared statement. “Working with the AT&T SmartMoves program is another way that we go beyond the brick and mortar of real estate and bring added value to our tenants.”