The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has awarded a $54 million contract to MetTel to modernize the VA’s telecom infrastructure, which includes 15,000 telephone landlines across 1,875 locations.
The VA granted the multi-year, single vendor award through the General Services Administration’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract.
“We provide connectivity via multiple paths from space-based broadband to LTE, supported by a network of data centers and points of presence (PoPs) across the U.S.,” Don Parente, VP of sales and solution architecture at MetTel Federal, said in an Aug. 5 press release.
“Given the variety of access pathways and robust infrastructure, MetTel can ensure reliability in communications – an attribute that is core to the VA’s mission to support our military veterans,” Parente added.
According to the release, MetTel will modernize the VA’s plain old telephone services (POTS) with its POTS Transformation solution and managed services. The company will upgrade standard voice lines, as well as ones used with equipment such as elevators, fire and burglar alarms, emergency 911 and call boxes, fax machines, and modems.
The solution will convert circuit switched phone signals to “networked, multi-path IP,” providing the VA with advanced features at a lower cost and without the need to replace its current equipment.
“MetTel’s fully-managed, multi-carrier POTS Transformation solution using the DataRemote, Inc. ‘POTS in a Box’ platform will maintain and improve VA voice connectivity while also offering additional features including detailed port-level analysis, 24/7 monitoring, multi-path failover and advanced reporting,” the company said.
The award – which MetTel first won in September 2024 – comes after a series of protests from competitor Granite Telecommunications.
Granite’s final protest resulted in a decision from the Government Accountability Office in July, which backed the VA’s selection of MetTel for the job.