GigaOm says AT&T's new services offering, despite the convoluted verbiage used to define it (it's called "synaptic hosting," and that's just the start), "could interest cloud-leery enterprise customers."

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The key advantage to AT&T's service is that it controls not just the servers and the cloud, but it also owns the network that those bits of data must traverse to get from the cloud to your computer. That's a powerful proposition because it gives AT&T one more potential point of failure that it can guarantee and control. It also could lead the way for some interesting pricing options given that AT&T will know exactly how much it costs for each byte of storage and each compute cycle, but it also has the wholesale costs of bandwidth.

The press release scopes the infrastructure behind AT&T's plan. Interesting that some of it is built on the bones of USInternetworking, an ASP-era pioneer that boomed and busted back in the day.

Related: Rackspace eyes the cloud as it takes its managed hosting business public. (Some discussion of what Rackspace does -- and hasn't been doing -- in this early look at Amazon's service offerings.)