Lee Enterprises reconnected with AT&T Inc., signing a $3 million, three-year contract extension with the service provider.

The pact calls for the telco to supply data and voice services aimed at satisfying the growing demands of the publisher, which has more than doubled in size over the past several years, said Brian Kardall, vice president of production and chief information officer.

“We have been centralizing and standardizing our systems for years,” he said. Lee’s 2005 acquisition of Pulitzer Inc.’s newspapers, which added 14 dailies including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to Lee’s stable, accelerated the need for a more robust telecom infrastructure, Kardall said.

A key goal of the new contract, said Craig Benisch, Lee’s manager of network security and telecommunications, is to ensure Lee has network redundancy in place in the event of an outage.

“We are examining various AT&T technologies to allow us to be as divergent as possible,” he said. “If we have one circuit down, than others will work.”

Benisch said Lee’s bandwidth requirements vary depending upon the size of the newspaper, ranging from slower virtual private network speeds to T1 circuits with throughput of up to 1.5 megabits per second.