Verizon Public Sector has entered into a $2 billion, 15-year critical infrastructure contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to design, build, operate and maintain the FAA’s next-generation communications platform. In other government client news, Verizon said it expects to save $700 million for the Department of Health and Human Services.
The FAA contract calls for Verizon to build a “dynamic, highly available and secure enterprise network to support all of the FAA’s mission critical applications across the National Airspace System (NAS), which includes providing Air Traffic Management (ATM) to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers traveling across the more than 29 million square miles of the U.S. national airspace system,” Verizon said.
The new enterprise platform is designed to give the FAA features such as dynamic service provisioning and reconfiguration, survivability, and on-demand service flow routing. Combined, these features will help provide higher security, faster performance and a flexible and more seamless user experience, according to Verizon.
As part of the contract, Verizon also will provide support services, including program management, network engineering, configuration management, test and evaluation (T&E), service ordering and provisioning, network and security management and operations.
Verizon’s network solution includes “an array of new capabilities to meet the next generation of applications with greater bandwidth requirements,” the carrier said in a press release. “The communications infrastructure is designed to support air and ground safety for passenger, freight and selected Department of Defense flights via three separate networks, one for NAS, one for administrative and one for research and development.”
“This is an incredible opportunity for Verizon to lead the nation’s largest government transportation agency through a telecommunications infrastructure transformation that utilizes the latest advances in technology and networking solutions,” Kyle Malady, Verizon Business CEO, said in a prepared statement. “From dynamic services and bandwidth provisioning to improved insight and visibility into network service configuration and operation, we are excited to help the FAA with a robust solution that will benefit the National Airspace System and administrative users alike.”
This was the second large announcement for the Verizon unit this week. Verizon Public Sector said that its $2.5 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) task order to modernize data and voice technology across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is already paying substantial dividends for the federal agency charged with enhancing the health and well-being of all Americans.
