GSA's latest infrastructure work highlights the technology demands that come with bringing employees back to federal workplaces. Douglas Rissing/Getty Images
Return-to-office push put GSA’s network infrastructure to the test
A recent upgrade project offers a glimpse at how one agency adapted its technology footprint as more federal employees returned to government offices.
Telecommunications services provider MetTel announced on Wednesday that it successfully completed network upgrades to 11 General Services Administration offices across the U.S. to help meet the needs of the Trump administration’s return-to-work mandate.
President Donald Trump signed a January 2025 executive order requiring that federal agencies “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements,” the vast majority of which evolved out of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. But an influx of employees back into offices also means that existing bandwidth and broadband services often need to be modernized.
MetTel said it outfitted the GSA offices “with Software-Defined Wide Area Network technology, 22 new high-capacity network circuits and Voice over IP services,” with the circuits being “tailored to the unique needs of each site.”
The work was conducted through GSA’s $50 billion governmentwide Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract to modernize its existing operations. MetTel received a $230 million task order under EIS in 2020 for network and voice infrastructure services.
A GSA spokesperson said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW that, “as the government’s needs continue to evolve, EIS contractors remain a dedicated partner, ready to respond to new requirements and support digital transformation efforts.”
MetTel has already taken steps to help modernize GSA’s operations, including announcing in November 2025 that it deployed “a nationwide network and voice infrastructure modernization” across the agency under the EIS contract.
In an interview with Nextgov/FCW, Don Parente — MetTel’s vice president of public sector — said that, “because we moved them to a software-defined architecture, it made it easier for us to very quickly spin up the dial and get additional bandwidth flowing for them.”
Parente said GSA’s previous SD-WAN adoption and embrace of faster broadband internet services, including Starlink, enabled it “to really pivot quickly when they needed to bring all these people back in the new office.”