NASA taps Qwest for broadband internet upgrade
August 11, 2009
NASA is awarding a $14.2 million contract to Qwest Government Services, a subsidiary of the broadband internet provider Qwest, to upgrade its agency communications network from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps.
NASA is working toward completing the upgrade of its Corporate Backbone, the high-speed broadband network that provides corporate wide area network transport for email and transmitting scientific, financial and business data.
Qwest said NASA selected its OWS (Optical Wave Services) approach for the flexibility that allows it to be adapted to almost any architecture.
OWS permits the agency a strong measure of security and reliability for its data transmissions between NASA headquarters and field agencies. All connections on the network are dedicated to the agency, so there is no competition for bandwidth.
The network also provides very little opportunity for hacking, since any connection must be made physically. "Any intrusion would be detected by Qwest's Network Operations Center (NOC)," the company said.
The contract is for eight years is under Qwest's U.S. General Services Administration's Networx Universal contract.
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