US FAA awards Verizon $2.4b contract for telecom network infrastructure

The US FAA said on Thursday it awarded Verizon Communications' (VZ.N) business networking unit a contract worth up to $2.4b over 15 years as the agency looks to modernize its systems. Verizon will design, build and operate the FAA’s new next-generation communications platform. The telecom company said it will "build the FAA a dynamic, highly available and secure enterprise network to support all of the agency's mission critical applications across the National Airspace System." Verizon said the new infrastructure will support all of the agency's mission critical applications across the National Airspace System, which includes providing Air Traffic Management to more than 45,000 daily flights and 2.9m airline passengers traveling across 29m square miles that make up the US national airspace system. Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady said the project would help lead the FAA through "a telecommunications infrastructure transformation that utilizes the latest advances in technology and networking solutions." He added the it would provide "dynamic services and bandwidth provisioning, to improved insight and visibility into network service configuration and operation." The FAA has said it needs to spend modernize many outdated systems. In January, the outage of a key pilot messaging database prompted a nationwide groundstop of US passenger traffic, the first since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.<br/>