Verizon has won some very high profile federal business. The telecommunications giant has won three task orders worth as much as $966.5M to modernize network infrastructure for the US Department of Defense in and around Washington DC.
The biggest of the three contracts checks in at $515.3M to transition the entire Pentagon from copper to fiber and IP voice, enabling a converged voice and data network spanning some 52,000 voice lines. Nearly that size is a $432.9M task order to deliver voice and data to 370 locations within the surrounding counties that make up the DOD National Capital Region. And the final $18.3M will be to upgrade Fort Belvoir’s network infrastructure.
Of course, one is simultaneously shocked and thoroughly unsurprised that the Pentagon is still using copper phone lines. But that is the nature of government bureaucracy, and obviously there is fiber and wireless already in that ecosystem they are just still using copper alongside it. I’m sure the same remains true across other federal departments in the region.
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Categories: Federal contracts · Fiber Networks · VoIP
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‘Verizon’ and “Modernization of networks” in the same sentence- that is hilarious.
By the time Verizon completes any of the tasks, they’ll need to modernize the networks again.
When will the USG stop running to this iceberg of a company just because they are the biggest and least likely to change hands? The USG is missing out on so many opportunities to truly modernize their networks and overall technology. It’s always the same thing, put out a huge RFP, written so that the only competitors can be huge, slow moving, stuck in a slog of process type companies. It’s too bad really.
Scary to think what the network looks like now if Verizon is going to “modernize”