GSA eliminates no firms in first round of telecom contract bidding

All four major telecommunication carriers vying for the General Service Administration's Networx Universal solicitation have made it through the first round of proposal evaluations.

Teams led by AT&T, MCI, Qwest and Sprint Nextel all want a stake in the contract vehicle's minimum revenue guarantee of $525 million for providing telecommunication services to government agencies. Bids were due last Oct. 5; GSA expects awards to be made no later than March 2007.

A GSA official speaking at a conference Thursday said the agency has determined the dollar range within which Networx Universal bids must have fallen in order to continue with the evaluation process.

Phone calls to telecommunication officials later confirmed that GSA notified all four bidders that their bids fell within the competitive range. "You can call it a downselect in which no one was downselected," said one company official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The next step is for those companies to meet with GSA officials to make any necessary revisions to their proposals, said Fred Schobert, Networx program manager, while speaking at the Federal Networks 2006 conference in Tysons Corner, Va. The meetings will occur before March 1, another industry official said.

Publicly, GSA officials have stressed the competitive nature of the bidding process, often saying that at least one bidder would be eliminated during the evaluation phase. Privately, industry players have said it's probable that all four carriers will end up with a piece of the final award, so long as their pricing bids fall within a comparable range.

The Networx Universal procurement has suffered a number of delays since its inception. Most recently, GSA pushed back the award date from July 2006 to March 2007. But the setbacks don't amount to a pattern, said John Johnson, assistant commissioner of service development and delivery at GSA's Federal Acquisition Service.

"I see it as a series of discrete events and I also see it as a normal course, in terms of an acquisition of this magnitude," he said during a conference break.

GSA observers have questioned whether the agency can successfully shoulder the amount of work it bears. In addition to the Networx procurement, Johnson also oversees a still-in-development $65 billion solicitation for information technology services, called Alliant.

That solicitation also has sustained delays. When Johnson first came on to supervise its development last fall, he ordered a review of the contract vehicle. Initially, he said results of the re-evaluation would be available to industry in November.

GSA officials now say that on Tuesday, they will post a video online explaining their updated thinking. It will replace a traditional industry day. "It's not as though we're saving a lot of money; it's just a way for us to reach a larger audience," Johnson said, explaining the unorthodox approach.

A second Alliant draft request for proposals will ensue shortly thereafter.