Fujitsu says DII is back on track

nearly half of user terminals have been rolled out for the army

Nearly half the user terminals for the delayed armed forces communications network have now been installed, according to contractor Fujitsu Services.

The £7.1bn Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) will eventually provide more than 140,000 terminals across 2,000 sites worldwide.

More than 63,000 terminals have been installed, with a further 40,000 due by the end of 2009.

A National Audit Office (NAO) report last year criticised the slow rollout of terminals, saying that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) contracted to have 62,800 DII terminals in place at permanent sites by the end of July 2007. As of April 2008, just 29,000 had been delivered.

After the report, the Atlas consortium, in which Fujitsu is responsible for installation of the terminals, adjusted its delivery date for DII by 18 months. But the project is now running smoothly, said Mike Newman, business unit director for defence and security at Fujitsu Services.

“Because it’s such a big infrastructure, security has to be very tight. It took longer than we thought to get through accreditation,” he said. “But our deadline has not slipped since the NAO report.”

The final batch of 40,000 terminals will be rolled out by the end of 2010, mainly to more distributed RAF sites. Some 250 MoD applications have been integrated into the platform.