GSA chooses 10 for $50B EIS telecom contract

Ten companies have won positions on the General Services Administration's potential 15-year, $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Services contract that replaces Networx as the government’s primary vehicle for telecommunications services.

Of those 10, four are holdovers from Networx but GSA wanted to open up the work to more competition and offer agencies more choices.

Incumbent winners are:

• AT&T
• CenturyLink
• Level 3 Communications
• Verizon

The newcomers are:

• BT Federal
• Core Technologies
• Harris Corp.
• Granite Telecommunications
• MetTel
• MicroTech

These companies will compete for task orders to provide agencies with a broad set of telecom related services including voice, video and data transport, hosting, cloud services, call centers, support services, cable and wiring, wireless, and network and security equipment.

EIS is the foundational contract for GSA's overarching NS2020 Strategy framework and acquisition strategy for future federal information technology and telecommunications needs.

This contract has been a long time in the making. GSA issued its request for information in April 2014 and the final solicitation in October 2015.

With the contract, GSA officials have said they’re looking for transformational communications services for federal agencies from a mix of traditional and non-traditional telecommunications services providers.

Bill Zielinski, deputy assistant commissioner for category management in the GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service said earlier this July at an industry conference that the contract will help agencies deal with the “digitally converged world” that has evolved since Networx was conceived.

Key to the contract are Core Based Statistical Areas that define most geographic areas of the US based on population density. Vendors were awarded certain CBSAs, based on their ability to provide services in the top 25 of 929 CBSAs.

Top CBSAs generally correspond to the major metropolitan centers in the u.S.. GSA encouraged bidders to bid for as many of the areas as they could, and judged them eligible for an award only if they bid on a minimum of 25 of the top 100 CBSAs.

The EIS contract award date slipped in small increments since last fall, but no major delays materialized. But there were two pre-award bid protests to work through.

The first protest came in August 2016 by Compuline International. GAO dismissed the protest a few weeks later in early September.

Windstream filed a protest in April, complaining that it had been unfairly eliminated from the competitive range. The company withdrew the protest one month later.

Verizon and AT&T have been the big winners under Networx with Verizon pulling in $775.8 million in work and AT&T at $719.5 million, according to a February presentation by GSA.

CenturyLink pulled in $253.5 million and Level 3 another $26.7 million. CenturyLink is in the process of acquiring Level 3.