WASHINGTON, D.C. – Verizon Public Sector today announced a 15-year critical infrastructure contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worth over $2 billion to design, build, operate and maintain the FAA's next-generation communications platform.

Under the terms of the Federal Aviation Administration Enterprise Network Services (FENS) contract, Verizon 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 (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 that make up the U.S. national airspace system.

Verizon's network solution is designed for the future with an array of new capabilities to meet the next generation of applications with greater bandwidth requirements. The communications infrastructure supports 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.

FENS is the successor to the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) contract, which was implemented in 2002 to provide consolidated telecom services for the 5,000 facilities and 30,000 circuits in the NAS. By extension, FENS will serve as the primary means for FAA's telecommunications services and forms the basic infrastructure for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen.

Additionally, the new enterprise platform managed by Verizon 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. Verizon also will provide an extensive set of support services including program management, network engineering, configuration management, test and evaluation (T&E), service ordering and provisioning, network and security management and operations.

Read the full press release here.

Verizon