The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently awarded Lumen Technologies a task order worth more than $1.2 billion to deliver a fully integrated wide area data transport service with secure remote access, contact center and cloud connectivity solutions to more than 9,500 USDA locations across the country and abroad. These solutions will enable nearly 100,000 USDA employees to effectively manage vital farming, food and nutrition, forestry and rural economic development services upon which America relies. The Lumen platform's edge computing architecture and vast fiber connectivity will help the USDA securely acquire, analyze and act on data closer to where it is collected at the edge of the network, which reduces latency and saves bandwidth.

The 11-year task order, which has an initial term through September 30, 2022, with 10 one-year options, was awarded to Lumen under the General Services Administration's 15-year, $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program. Lumen will provide the USDA with managed network, managed security and voice solutions that support speeds up to 100 gigabits per second, including software-defined wide area network services (SD-WAN); managed trusted internet protocol services (MTIPS); zero-trust networking solutions; edge computing and remote access solutions; virtual private network services; cloud connectivity; unified communications and collaboration solutions; contact center solutions; voice over internet protocol (VoIP), wireless and satellite services; ethernet transport; optical wavelength solutions; related equipment and engineering services.