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Communications and services provider Comscentre has reached the halfway mark ahead of schedule in a project to overhaul the network capabilities of 4,000 Australia Post sites.
It has taken the provider nine months to upgrade over 2,000 sites and follows a successful pilot program.
The project, as reported previously, sees Comscentre tasked with upgrading Australia Post’s fixed-line network, with the provider to use the National Broadband Network (NBN) to deliver business-grade services to the organisation.
According to Comscentre, the upgraded sites are giving Australia Post increased network resilience and unspecified "substantial" reductions in ongoing network operating costs.
The new network is also utilising Comscentre’s internally developed enterprise network management platform One Touch Control, which the provider considered to be a point of difference in securing the project.
The platform combines multi-vendor and multi-carrier connectivity into one dashboard that monitors and reports on network performance, hardware health, carrier service level agreements (SLAs) and best practice business processes.
Australia Post CIO Munro Farmer said the project came at a time when the postal service has been facing logistical challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This has been a big effort for all of the teams involved, both across Australia Post and Comscentre, and speeding the cycle time has helped us just as we’re moving quickly to support parcel volumes, allowing us to stand up services much more quickly than we were previously able to,” he said.
Cameron Quilty, Comscentre executive director, added that reaching the halfway milestone meant Australia Post has been able to thrive, especially in locations away from metropolitan areas.
“That’s enabling greater investment back into the continued improvement of services to rural and remote Australian communities, which is an incredibly positive outcome, particularly in times such as these when we’re all feeling more isolated than ever,” he said.
“With every SD-WAN/NBN network transition, we’re delivering a far more resilient national network with significant reductions in outages and greatly improved network-wide uptime.”
In addition to the network overhaul, Australia Post also awarded Comscentre with a five-year managed services contract back in August 2019.
