AT&T Government wins VPN contract extension from USPS

The U.S. Postal Service has just signed, sealed and delivered a four-year, $120 million network contract extension to AT&T Government Solutions. 

Awarded under the Postal Advanced Telecommunications Network contract, AT&T will deliver a host of services, including IP address management, design and engineering, onsite installation, router, firewall and Interactive Voice Response. Serving as the engine for the network deployment is AT&T's global MPLS-enabled data network. In addition to wireline MPLS services, AT&T will provide wireless voice and data services accessed through BlackBerry 8800 series handsets.

Since the U.S. Postal Service decided in 2006 that it would like to have two carriers for its telecom services (AT&T and Verizon Business), AT&T has been gaining a bigger piece of the agency's network pie. Prior to 2006, Verizon Business (and the former MCI Worldcom) was the Postal Service's only service provider, but the agency thought that using one carrier offered a single point of failure and was too cost prohibitive. That's not to downplay Verizon's role in the Postal Service. It continues to carry a large portion of the agency's network traffic and it won a $60 million contract extension to consolidate three networks onto one common IP backbone called the Postal Information Technology Network (PITN).

For more:
- see the release here
- Network World also has this article

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