NEC and the WA Police Force have signed a major GovNext-ICT contract worth $39 million for the transformation of the Wide Area Network, Local Area Network and IP Telephony environments across every WA Police Force site.

This new network and IP Tel solution for WA Police Force will deliver vastly improved bandwidth to all WA Police stations and campuses and be enabled with end-to-end encryption to ensure absolute protection for sensitive police communications.

Additionally, a state of the art “GovNext-ICT” hosted Cisco IP Telephony Service is being deployed state-wide to ensure robust, reliable, highly available and secure communication for every WA Police officer.

“These new GovNext-ICT services are the foundation of our digital policing capabilities in direct alignment with our vision to continue as an exceptional Police Force for our community, said Andrew Cann, CIO, WA Police Force.

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

“The GovNext initiative is all about providing WA government agencies with the underlying ICT infrastructure to better deliver services to the community,” said Greg Italiano, Government Chief Information Officer.

“The GovNext solution being deployed by NEC for WA Police Force will provide the network and communications services to support the future operational needs of the WA Police Force.

“This is consistent with the outcomes GovNext is delivering across a range of other agencies,” Mr Italiano said.

Over the next 12 months more than 200 Police sites across 2.5 million square kilometres of Western Australia will be enabled with high bandwidth, redundant network connectivity and a state of the art IP Telephony solution that can be integrated with broader Collaboration Strategies being developed.

“NEC has a strong pedigree in solutions for Emergency Services across Australia and the world and we are delighted to be working with WA Police on this important initiative,” said Marcus Ashby, State Manager NEC Western Australia.

“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.

“Our company motto globally is ‘orchestrating a brighter world’, so there is no better example of that than what we are doing here with WA Police for all the citizens of WA,” Marcus Ashby said.