BT wins £39m NATO backbone contract
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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.
![NATO HQ](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/2014/10/02/6ede3729-4a11-11e4-b6a0-d4ae52e95e57/nato-headquarters-nato.jpg)
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.