AT&T ratchets up fight for $1.6B in FBI telecom task orders
By
Nick Wakeman
AT&T lost a pair of FBI network modernization task orders worth $1.6 billion combined and is now fighting for at least a second chance to win them.
AT&T is disputing two FBI awards that went to rivals under the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions vehicle for telecommunications services to agencies.
Verizon won a $1.2 billion EIS task order for telecom services at the FBI, while Lumen won a separate $419.3 million job data networking and voice services.
AT&T pursued both task orders and is arguing that the evaluations were not done properly.
All three companies declined to comment on the protests.
The EIS contract is a huge vehicle held by nine companies that are competing for task orders to modernize federal telecom environments.
Verizon has been the biggest winner under EIS so far, capturing 40 percent of the task orders by value. AT&T is next with 25.5 percent and Lumen holds third place with 22.2 percent.
There is a very steep drop off after that with no other EIS carrier capturing even 5 percent. The other firms on EIS are Granite Telecommunications, MetTel, Core Technologies, BT Group, L3Harris Technologies and Comcast.
Comcast joined the group through its acquisition of MicroTech’s EIS business.
An interesting side note: AT&T is showing some sophistication in how it filed the protests.
AT&T filed them separately and all within five days of getting the debriefing. The second set of protests occurred within 10 days of the debriefing.
The significance is that the five-day protests automatically triggered a “stay,” or stop-work order. Set number two came within 10 days of the debrief, another important deadline.
Challenges to an agency decision can be declared “untimely” if raised after 10 days. In other words, GAO could say, Sorry, too late to raise that issue.
Once AT&T sees the agency response to the protest, which is due 30 days after the initial filing, the company can then file its own response and raise new challenges that agency response may have triggered.
AT&T filed the first protests on Sept. 20, so the FBI is set to reply around Oct. 20. A final decision from the Government Accountability Office is due Dec. 29.