AT&T Gets $175M DOT Contract for IP, Voice Infrastructure Upgrade, Chris Smith Quoted

AT&T (NYSE: T) has received a potential 12-year, $175 million contract from the Department of Transportation to perform voice and internet protocol infrastructure upgrade work, Fierce Telecom reported Tuesday.

The contract calls for the company to provide DOT with cloud technology, virtual private networking, managed IP services, network-based firewall and other security support services to help meet the demand for telework capabilities and support the deployment of new IP-based applications.

Chris Smith, vice president of civilian and shared services for AT&T’s public sector business and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said the company’s software-defined networking capabilities will enable the department to extend its network to any public cloud in order to deliver “flexible bandwidth.”

Smith noted that the company expects the contract to result in activity over software-defined wide area networks since there is an opportunity to use “over-the-top internet capacity” and Multiprotocol Label Switching to meet DOT’s demands as it moves forward.

“We expect a good deal of uptake,” Smith said of SD-WAN. “We’ve seen that throughout the market over the last couple of years…government is just coming into that space, we’ve seen some of it but we expect to see a healthy demand for it moving forward here.”

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