Comcast wins $102M Defense contract for Ethernet services

Comcast Business beat four other bidders to win a 10-year, $102.8 million contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to provide Ethernet for the agency’s Defense Information Systems Network. The network includes sites in Maryland, Washington, D.C, Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky.

DISA provides enterprise network and IT infrastructure to support the requirements of the Department of Defense’s more than 40 military services, combatant commands and support organizations worldwide, including the president, vice president and secretary of defense. 

The agency is currently undergoing a multi-phase process of replacing 17,000 legacy, point-to-point, public switched telephone network (PSTN) circuits with Ethernet-based services across seven regions in the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia. Its Region 3 provides DISA with the underlying network infrastructure to enable voice, video and data services.

Comcast Business will help DISA by delivering its Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) service, which provides a private, point-to-multipoint network design between multiple locations. Compared to certain legacy wide area network (WAN) technologies, EVPL offers a strong potential for performance improvements and managed costs, according to Comcast.

“We are honored that DISA has once again selected – and more importantly entrusted – Comcast Business for its important initiative of modernizing its communications infrastructure and enhancing connectivity with its partners across the military’s information network,” said Ken Folderauer, VP of government sales for Comcast Business, in a statement.

As government contracts go, this is a fairly large one. But it’s small potatoes compared to the U.S. Department of Defense award to Microsoft of its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud-computing contract.

RELATED: AWS says Trump's bias, procedural errors led to Microsoft's $10B JEDI win

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has protested the JEDI award to Microsoft, alleging that former President Trump's dislike of Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos played a role in Microsoft winning the contract. AWS has filed a lawsuit to reverse the decision.

Court documents filed May 28 indicate the Defense Department plans to continue to defend the JEDI contract award to Microsoft, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.