The General Services Administration (GSA) has rolled out a sweeping modernization of its nationwide voice and data network through telecommunications company MetTel, upgrading nearly 800 sites with a new technology overhaul.
Under GSA’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract, MetTel incorporated SD-WAN, zero trust, and low Earth orbit satellite connectivity to “enable federal employees to work efficiently across a geographically dispersed organization, including in some of the nation’s most remote locations,” according to MetTel.
The improvements follow an executive order from the White House earlier this year, which ordered most federal employees to return to work on-site. According to MetTel officials, their recent modernization efforts included upgrading data circuits to support the “Return to Office” bandwidth requirements.
Those efforts also migrated hundreds of digital subscriber lines and LTE sites to better broadband and Ethernet services.
“Through close collaboration, GSA now has a future-ready network infrastructure that is secure, resilient, and scalable. This project sets a new benchmark for federal technology modernization,” said Don Parente, vice president of public sector sales at MetTel, in a press release.
GSA made its EIS contract award for telecommunications and infrastructure to MetTel in 2020 for a 15-year period, according to the company and agency award notices.
MetTel said that implementing zero trust architecture by integrating the SD-WAN with zero trust security was the project’s “cornerstone.” The company said this eliminated “the need for traditional managed trusted internet protocol services gateways,” while “optimizing traffic flow for cloud applications.”
“The voice transformation was equally significant, migrating legacy time-division multiplexing services to a modern SIP-based environment with multi-carrier redundancy and specialized support for critical life-and-safety lines in elevators and alarm panels,” said MetTel officials.