The three-year, multi-million pound contract will see O2 provide LAN and WAN infrastructure to Network Rail’s newly built National Centre, which will accommodate 3500 staff this summer. O2, as part of its Unify subsidiary, will provide support and maintenance to the present Cisco switch and router technology, and implement a project to refresh Cisco’s other equipment which is deemed inadequate to support future requirements for the business. O2 said the new LAN and WAN infrastructure will support Network Rail’s business objectives for delivering mission critical network resiliency and availability.
“Our strong service culture and customer focus from our core mobile business put us in a very strong position to provide wider communications services,” said Paul Osborne, managing director of O2 Unify. “We demonstrated strong technical capability in the LAN and WAN space as well as good commercial positioning. O2 Unify is viewed as a safe pair of hands to deliver this project and we now provide a whole range of services for Network Rail including project management, business process outsourcing and consultancy as well as products such as WAN, LAN, fixed and mobile”
Network Rail has set out a strategy to reduce its costs by 21% over the next five years and its backbone upgrade with O2 is designed to further reduce the total cost of ownership of its network infrastructure.
