AT&T Business added a hint of color to plans for integrating Amazon’s satellite-based Leo service, which will run as a managed connectivity layer on top of AT&T’s fiber and wireless network services.

New details note the service will be provided as a managed offering to AT&T Business customers. This includes redundancy and increased reach across terrestrial and now extra-terrestrial connectivity.

AT&T touted this “unified architecture” as different from competitor’s “standalone service” by allowing users to “leverage the right connectivity option for their business needs through a single provider and experience. This architecture supports flexible networking options, allowing customers to integrate satellite connectivity seamlessly into their preferred IT and network environments.”

What’s not yet being provided is service availability, pricing, and specific product configurations for interested enterprise customers. That might be likely due to the still nascent maturity of Amazon’s low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation.

The Federal Communications Commission recently granted Amazon a conditional waiver that removed the mandate that it have half of its Leo satellite constellation in orbit by July 30 after declining a February request by the company to have the deadline extended by two years. Amazon currently has around 400 satellites in orbit, with Leo management having said the constellation will enter commercial service later this year.

Amazon late last year revealed the final design of its Leo Ultra enterprise-grade satellite terminal capable of supporting download speeds of up to 1 Gbps. The terminal is a full-duplex phased array antenna, meaning it can transmit and receive simultaneously at the same frequency, and can be affixed to buildings or placed on the ground

AT&T in its announcement expressed “confidence in Amazon Leo is grounded in extensive technical validation. AT&T and Amazon Leo are moving through a structured, phased deployment designed to ensure business-grade reliability before road availability.”

Building toward the sky

The launch continues ongoing collaboration between AT&T and AWS.

The most direct correlation was a deal struck earlier this year to link more of the carrier’s internal operating systems onto AWS and outbound connectivity to Amazon’s Leo satellite play, with AWS in turn tapping AT&T’s rapidly expanding fiber footprint to boost cloud connectivity.

That multifaceted agreement includes AT&T migrating workloads from several of its current on-premises technologies to an on-premises, managed-cloud iteration of AWS Outposts. AT&T will use AWS’ Professional Services, Amazon Q Developer, and AWS Agentic Services to push that migration.

AWS more recently added AT&T’s network footprint to its managed AWS Interconnect service for linking branch offices, data centers, and remote locations to the AWS cloud. This allows for the quick instantiation of private, high-speed connections to AWS, with provisioning through an AWS-generated activation key once that link is completed.

Broad satellite plans

Despite the deeper Leo ties, AT&T maintains mixed-messaging on the potential of satellite-based connectivity.

AT&T CEO John Stankey recently told investors during the carrier’s latest earnings call that he sees “corner cases” where satellite-based connectivity can be melded into its operations.

“I do believe there'll be areas that satellite might serve adequately that allow us to maybe shrink our terrestrial footprint on what I would refer to as ‘poverty sites’ – sites that sit out there and pick up relatively small amounts of traffic, but provide continuity of connectivity and that might be able to positively impact our cost structure in those instances, and at the same time give the customer a really good experience. So I do expect rural characteristics of our business to change,” Stankey explained, adding that this will also allow the carrier to take costs out of serving those areas.

“As you know, in the fixed part of my business, I'm trying very hard to shrink footprint. That's all the comments I made about shutting down wire centers and going to zero customers. I want assets out of those areas. I want to take costs out. I don't want to be prevalent there,” Stankey continued. “Where I want to be prevalent is where I can build fiber, and where I can use fiber to put wireless transmitting entities at the end of it, Edge points, and use those networks effectively in consolidating traffic.”

Stankey noted specifically that this plan is targeted at geographic areas where AT&T sees just a small percentage of network traffic, areas where potential satellite-based partnerships could be put into place.

“That's the fundamental underpinning of the business we want to build and then establish paired relationships or joint relationships with other providers to fill in that small percentage of the time that the customer walks off our network. That two percent of the traffic that maybe we can't get on that infrastructure,” Stankey said. “I like coming at the customer where we own and operate 98 percent of the traffic. We have control of it. We have control of the product and the service that we offer, and that maybe we do the integration and leasing on the other two percent as opposed to the other way around.”

However, AT&T does have ongoing financial and spectrum investments in AST SpaceMobile and a recently formed joint venture with fellow telecom giants Verizon and T-Mobile US.

“The work that we're doing through combination of the JV and all the technical work we've been doing up to this point in time, for example, with one of the partners we're working with, AST Space Mobile, those are all going to come to fruition as we move into next year, and it's going to be the product that we've been working on with the AST offering [that] will be a very intuitive product that doesn't require the customer to do anything differently,” Stankey said.

“They have their device and it behaves and operates just like it does today as they're moving around. But if they walk off the network, they're not going to walk off the network. We're going to provide them a seamless transition into coverage via satellite on a direct-to-device basis, and so those are the corner cases I was alluding to that by the time we get into next year, we will have solved for that other two percent and we will be in the market doing what customers want, which is providing them the assurance that they can buy from one provider and always be on the internet.”