Cisco wins $38m NBN contract

Cisco has been awarded a five-year contract worth up to $38 million to provide equipment to support the National Broadband Networks’s (NBN) national connectivity network (NCN).

The NCN provides national Ethernet and IP connectivity to transport internal NBN Co services, such as operational management traffic, wireless signalling traffic and NBN Co enterprise traffic.

Cisco will provide routers and firewalls for the network, which will be deployed in NBN depots and aggregation nodes.

“This equipment will enable communication between NBN Co’s centralised operational staff and IT systems with the fibre, fixed wireless and satellite equipment situated at various locations across Australia,” Tony Cross, NBN Co’s executive general manager of network architecture and technology, said in a statement.

“The remote control of this equipment, via the NCN, will allow new services to be activated and faults to be diagnosed and repaired quickly and efficiently across Australia.”

Despite NBN Co already using Alcatel-Lucent's equipment for the NBN, The Australian reported that Cisco won the contract due to Alcatel-Lucent's equipment being unsuitable on a national level.

The contract is not the first NBN agreement for Cisco. In November 2010 the company, with consortium partners EMC and VMware, were awarded a $9.5 million contract from NBN Co to provide a data centre computing platform to support NBN Co’s business and operations systems.

“This has been an important project for both organisations and has enabled industry-leading data centre capabilities for NBN Co’s significant scale and flexibility requirements,” Sam Gerner, director of service provider and cloud for Cisco Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement.

Cisco research has also shown support for the NBN, with a a study recently predicting a seven-fold increase in internet traffic by 2016, proving the need to deploy the NBN.

Follow Stephanie McDonald on Twitter: @stephmcdonald0

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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