The deal on the NBN National Connectivity Network (NCN) is estimated to be worth up to $38 million over five years.
The technology will be deployed in NBN Co’s depot, aggregation nodes and other locations, supporting operations support system and business support system platforms, as well as signalling and timing.
"We are pleased to extend our relationship with Cisco as a supplier of data centre infrastructure to include the supply of a high-performing, highly secure network foundation composed of switches, routers and firewalls to support our NCN,” said Tony Cross, executive general manager of network architecture and technology at NBN Co.
The equipment will enable communications between NBN Co’s centralised operational staff and IT systems with fibre, fixed wireless and satellite equipment across Australia. Through the remote controlling of equipment using the NCN, NBN Co will be able to activate new services and diagnose faults, according to Cisco.
Cisco also won another contract in late 2010 in a consortium with EMC and VMware to provide NBN Co with a data centre platform.
The NBN project is expected to expand to nearly 12 million premises by 2012, passing 6,000 premises each day at its peak.
