It looks as though Sun isn't the only big player with spare network capacity anxious to get in on the cloud computing hype. AT&T has announced, by way of a deal with the US Olympic Committee that it will be offering storage and network services to corporate customers.

The service, called Synaptic Hosting, is described only the the most general terms on the company's site. It appears to be a combination of virtualized storage and processing capacity tapped into AT&T's existing network backbone, which may mean that the strength of the service will be in its speed and connectivity rather than depth of features.

Amazon's S3 problems are mentioned in nearly every article I have read so far on the AT&T offering, used as the obligatory cautionary warning about relying on utility computing services... despite the fact that many companies already have internal outages which are more significant, and that we none of us yet know any of the specifics of AT&T's offering. I'm not even sure that it will constitute "cloud computing" as I define it.

With fellow telecom giant Verizon also poised to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon in 2009, AT&T has only a little time to prove themselves in the market before facing others with similar strengths, to say nothing of more traditional industry players.