NEC inks $39m networking upgrade deal with WA Police

Western Australia’s 158 police stations are set to benefit from improved connectivity after NEC Australia was selected to deliver a $39 million networking upgrade.

The contract, which has been signed under the government’s transformed IT buying regime GovNext, aims to improve the force’s WAN, LAN and IP Telephony environments state-wide.

More than 200 police stations, campuses and other sites located across 2.5 million square kilometres are expected to transition to the new end-to-end encrypted network over the next 12 month.

NEC said the network would deliver “vastly improved bandwidth”, network redundancy and “ensure absolute protection for sensitive police communications”.

The network will include a “state of the art” Cisco IP Telephony solution hosted in GovNext, which NEC said would “ensure robust, reliable, highly available and secure communication”.

WA Police chief information officer Andrew Cann said the new GovNext services would become the bedrock of the force’s “digital policing capabilities”.

The policing agency’s digital policing program is currently rolling out 4800 body-worn video cameras (BWV) and 3500 mobile devices to frontline officers across the state.

Mobile devices are expected to be fully deployed by December 2019, while the BWV rollout is expected to complete by 2021

“Additionally, the very fundamental principles of GovNext driving the best outcomes for the state are being demonstrated with this contract,” Cann added.

The policing agency has been looking to transition from an owner-operated IT model to a consumption-based model, which it has positioned itself for since at least 2014.

It will now turn its attention to its transition to the cloud as part of GovNext after scoring a $10.2 million windfall in this year’s WA budget.

Government chief information officer Greg Italiano said the NEC solution would provide WA Police with the “network and communications service to support [its] future operational needs”

NEC Australia’s state manager for WA said the contract was a reflection of the company’s “strong pedigree in solutions for Emergency Services across Australia and the world”.

Earlier this year, the company won a similar $23 million networking deal with WA Health to improve connectivity at health sites across regional and rural areas of the state.

“To be trusted with the transformation of one of the State’s most important networks that will ultimately lead to a safer Western Australia is something everyone at NEC and our partner community are very proud of,” he said.