Qwest Communications International Inc. will help upgrade the voice network at the Energy Department under a new $8.3 million contract the company received from Energy Enterprise Solutions LLC.

The upgrade allows DOE to maintain its existing voice services while transitioning to voice-over-IP capabilities, Qwest said.

EES of Germantown, Md., is the principal information technology support services provider for DOE headquarters facilities in the Washington area. The upgrade is for the department’s dual headquarters located in Washington and Germantown.

Qwest will transition the agency’s existing voice switch to a Nortel Communications Server 2100, an IP-enabled communications server that is scalable from 5,000 to 200,000 ports.

To support the switch upgrade, the contract also includes a network solution to be deployed between the two DOE headquarters locations. The network solution, called QWave, is a managed, private, point-to-point service delivered over a dense wave division multiplexing network at speeds as high as 10 gigabits/sec. QWave will also provide redundancy to protect the network against unexpected failures.

In addition to DOE headquarters, Qwest has installed and provisioned voice network modernizations at the department’s major facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Los Alamos, N.M.; and Richland, Wash.

Denver-based Qwest ranks No. 54 on Washington Technology’s 2007 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.