EUROCONTROL and 41 industry partners, primarily air navigation service providers (ANSPs), signed a new contract with BT for the management of a Pan-European Network Service (NewPENS).
BT, a leading telecom operator in the U.K., said the 10-year contract has an estimated total value of more than €50 million.
The network will connect around 100 locations across 47 countries in the EUROCONTROL area and neighbouring countries. All air traffic management (ATM) stakeholders can use the network to transfer business-critical data in a cost-efficient way.
It will be built on BT’s IP network with mission-critical connections running on a dual core infrastructure, offering parallel connectivity that is physically and logically separated in order to provide the highest levels of availability and resilience.
NewPENS is a major upgrade to PENS, which was launched in December 2009. It is a major upgrade – in service management as well as network architecture – and the backbone for cross-border data and voice communications for the Network Manager, ANSPs and other ATM stakeholders.
Many leading multinationals, such as members of the BT Radianz Cloud, the world’s largest secure networked financial markets community, already rely on BT to connect their critical global operations, people and data.
“The networking infrastructure we will put in place for the NewPENS community will ensure ultra-high levels of resilience and security for air traffic controllers to help them guide planes safely to their destinations,” said Bas Burger, CEO Global Services, BT.
The Network Manager will begin the transition to NewPENS as soon as possible after the signature of the contract. BT will set up its organisation, service management framework, service desk, processes, transition model and network between April and September 2018.
The nearly 100 sites belonging to 30 plus current PENS users as well as EUROCONTROL will be transferred in clusters to NewPENS between October 2018 and 30 November 2019, the date on which the current PENS contract will expire.
