Lumen scores $110M DoD contract to bolster fiber backbone

Lumen Technologies just bagged a $110 million contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to operate and maintain the agency’s fiber backbone.

The contract lasts five years, from November 30,2023, through September 30, 2028. A Lumen representative told Fierce the award was a renewal of a legacy dark fiber contract with DISA.

According to Lumen, DISA’s fiber backbone includes colocation facilities, dark fiber, diverse end-to-end network infrastructure and new fiber builds, as well as system updates that “use new technologies to improve network resilience, decrease latency and increase availability.”

Asked if Lumen already began working on the contract, the rep said, “Lumen provides ongoing services to DISA as an existing customer, so no disruption of services will occur.”

The spokesperson clarified this latest award is not part of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program.

Under an EIS contract, awardees are required to offer virtual private network (VPN) services, managed network service, voice and Ethernet.

The $110 million award follows a $223 million DoD contract Lumen received in February to provide modern hybrid-cloud voice and audio-conferencing services. Last fall, the company bagged another DoD deal (this one worth $1.5 billion) to offer Indo-Pacific transport services.

Asked if Lumen finds network services increasingly in demand among public sector customers, the spokesperson said, “the network is the foundation for government agencies’ IT modernization efforts.”

Prior to its work with the DoD, Lumen secured large network services contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of the Interior (DoI), each worth $1.2 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively.

The USDA enlisted Lumen to overhaul the agency’s legacy network over an 11-year period – work that includes the integration of SD-WAN services. Under the DoI contract, the company was tasked to modernize network services for subsidiaries such as the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.