AT&T has won a 12-year, $175 million contract with the U.S. Department of Transportation to modernize the agency’s enterprise network infrastructure and services.
Under the Enterprise Infrastructure Services award, AT&T will provide U.S. DoT with virtual private networking, security services, IP-based voice, cloud access and other related enterprise communications services.
“We’re here to help them transform their communications systems on the data side: Fiber networks and VPN and MPLS and everything that goes in an enterprise-class network,” said Chris Smith, AT&T’s VP of civilian and shared services, public sector and FirstNet, adding that DoT employees need to be able to access cloud-based workloads as well as voice and unified communications and online collaboration tools. He says that he thinks of AT&T’s role as helping the DoT with transformation and innovation along the way, as it delivers on its commitments to an agency that is, itself, focused in part on advancing technology in areas such as drones or intelligent transportation systems. “It’s critically important that we deliver on-time and that they have these capabilities to better enable them to efficiently and effectively deliver their services, to operate in efficiency and to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and continue the critically important work that they’re doing,” he said.
The Department of Transportation employs nearly 55,000 people across the country and includes agencies such as the Federal Highway Administration; the Federal Railroad Administration; the Maritime Administration; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration; and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Asked about the trend toward remote work in federal agencies, Smith said that he doesn’t the pendulum swinging all the way back on in-office work.
“We’re going to continue to see remote work as a mainstay of individuals’ worklife, if they’re able to do it,” he said. “We’ll have people in our offices — and that goes for government agencies and industry — but you’re going to see a lot more flexibility in that,” he continued, offering the possibility that employees may work in-office for one or several days a week but work from home or in the field on other days.
AT&T says it is delivering to U.S. DoT an IP-based communications platform “that can support its technology modernization ambitions well into the next decade. Our network platform will allow DOT to extend its network perimeter beyond physical buildings and use cloud services that support increased demand for remote working … [and] the demands of new IP-based apps DOT intends to roll out in the coming years.”
