$120 million extension keeps AT&T in charge of the US Postal Service’s managed VPN
The US Postal Service has renewed its managed VPN contract with AT&T, which provides them with one of the biggest managed VPN networks in the world.
The contract was originally won in 2003 and sees the provision of a massive managed VPN network throughout the United States, with over 5,500 US Postal Service facilities installed with managed VPN hardware and services.
The project as a whole has been named PATN, for Postal Advanced Telecommunications Network, and the managed VPN is supplied using AT&T’s Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, alongside firewall, IP address and router management services. Also in the contract are interactive voice response, engineering and network design services.
One of the biggest challenges of this particular managed VPN contract is providing network access to thousands of retail points of sale throughout the country, and making sure they are all connected and running smoothly on a day to day basis.
The US Postal Service also provides Blackberry 8800 handsets to 5,400 of its employees, providing additional flexibility to the managed VPN.
The renewal of this contract, at a cost of $120 million for four years, means The Postal Service becomes one of AT&T’s biggest customers worldwide. This is just part of an estimated $600 million spent by the US Postal Service each year on telecommunications services, including the managed VPN, data and video services.
Such a large managed VPN will require a huge amount of resource to maintain its security and integrity and AT&T will be hoping to maintain this over the next four years.