Trio of bidders protest DREN

Three of the four losing bidders for the $450 million Defense Research and Engineering Network contract have filed protests objecting to WorldCom Inc. winning the work.

AT&T Corp., Global Crossing Ltd., and Sprint Communications Corp. are protesting the award. Sprint and AT&T are complaining that their bids were not fairly evaluated.

Global Crossing, which won the award last summer only to have it pulled away because of protests, is claiming it was unfairly deemed "ineligible for award" because of its financial situation.

Qwest Communications International Inc. is the only bidder that declined to protest the April 4 award.

The DREN contract provides long-haul communication service for more than 5,000 users of the Defense Department's high-performance computing network.