BT wins £39m NATO backbone contract

BT has won a contract to supply NATO with its communications backbone, the company revealed on Thursday.

The five-year deal is worth €47m (£39m) and will see NATO's existing network backbone migrated over to BT Ethernet Connect. The network connects more than 70 locations in the NATO nations and the Balkans.

BT has won a contract to supply NATO with its communications backbone, the company revealed on Thursday. Image credit: NATO

"Information, and the ability to share it rapidly across a coalition, plays a paramount role in 21st century operations, as well as political decision-making. To underpin this we need a flexible, future-proof network," Georges D'hollander, general manager at NATO's Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A), said in a statement.

Ethernet Connect is BT's flexible virtual private network (VPN). The company said it would let NATO establish a highly secure and global wide area network (WAN).

Apart from providing the backbone, BT will also provide hardware and Ethernet Connect E-LINE services, which "provides protected bandwidth for mission-critical applications between sites", the company said.

BT has already been working with NATO as a communications supplier since 1998, and has performed four network migrations for the organisation during that time, a BT spokesman told ZDNet UK.