Verizon Public Sector announced today that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded the company a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to design, build, operate, and maintain the FAA’s next-generation communications platform.
Under FAA’s Enterprise Network Services contract, Verizon will build the agency a dynamic, highly available, and secure enterprise network to support all of the agency’s mission critical applications across the National Airspace System (NAS), the press release said.
NAS provides air traffic management to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers traveling across the 29 million square miles that make up the U.S. national airspace system.
“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,” said Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady.
He continued, adding, “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.”
According to Verizon, the company’s new enterprise platform will provide the FAA with features such as dynamic service provisioning and reconfiguration, survivability, on-demand service flow routing to deliver higher security, faster performance, and a flexible, more seamless user experience.
The contract, disclosed on March 31, comes nearly three months after FAA’s critical alert system failed, temporarily halting thousands of departing flights across the country. The FAA blamed the outage on contractors who accidentally deleted files from a database and its backup.
FAA officials have said they need to modernize the alert system and many other programs. Airline officials have supported the agency, telling Congress to provide more funding for FAA technology.
