Verizon bags Federal Aviation Administration FENS contract

Verizon Public Sector has 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.

“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 Kyle Malady, Verizon Business CEO. “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.”

Malady added: “With our team of recognized, proven partners, Verizon has expanded our core competencies, enabling us to meet the evolving needs of the NAS and the FENS contract requirements.”

Erik Smith, President and CEO of Saab in the U.S. said, “We are thrilled to be teamed with Verizon on this project. Nobody is better prepared to provide a secure and reliable network of this scale. With Saab’s FAA, air traffic management, and system wide information management (SWIM) experience, our team is ready to help the FAA evolve toward their information-centric operations vision”

“Frequentis is proud to partner with Verizon on the FENS program with our high-availability network equipment. We are looking forward to supporting Verizon’s FENS team in its evolution of the FAA’s network infrastructure,” said Dieter Eier, President of Frequentis USA.

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.