IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council is the host organisation for the Full Fibre Northern Ireland (FFNI) Consortium. FFNI is a consortium of the ten councils in Northern Ireland outside Belfast. FFNI was awarded a grant of GBP 15 m from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Wave three Local Full Fibre Network Programme. This is supplemented by other sources of funding, including DCMS Rural Gigabit Connectivity grant funding and consortium member and customer funding. FFNI’s gigabit capable fibre project recognises that the provision of high quality, reliable high-speed connectivity is a necessity for a 21st century economy and society. FFNI is therefore seeking to future proof its own network connectivity requirements for the next 20 years or more through the installation of gigabit-capable digital infrastructure services. Newry, Mourne and Down District Council (The Council) hosts the Full Fibre Northern Ireland (FFNI) Consortium and is procuring services on behalf of the consortium members and other public sector customers. FFNI is a consortium of the ten Northern Ireland Councils outside Belfast. This procurement is one of several that will be operated by the Council on behalf of the customers, dividing the total requirement into smaller collections of sites. The Council wishes to procure a supplier of gigabit-capable fibre connectivity services that will underpin wide area network connectivity to customer sites. FFNI’s gigabit-capable connectivity project is part-funded by the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) through Wave three of its local full fibre network programme (LFFN). It may also be part-funded by the DCMS Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) Programme and by other sources of funding. The Council requires the supplier to design, build and operate the services over the duration of the contract. The Council wishes to procure replacement access circuits in the form of Point-to-Point (P2P) dark fibre or virtual equivalent circuits (Tail Circuit Services) to customer locations across the consortium members’ administrative areas. These infrastructure services will be procured over the long term, from 20 to 30 years or more. It is anticipated that through the potentially large number of connected sites, economies of scale may be realised through aggregation, leading to innovative and cost-effective solutions from the market. The customers intend to separate the provision of these infrastructure services from the provision of their wide area network (WAN) services. Their WAN managed services will be delivered through the arrangements with existing WAN suppliers or will be separately procured. The supplier may provide all elements of the solution itself or may combine commodity services and products from telecoms providers, services from subcontractors and its own tools, services and expertise, to provide the solution. The supplier will provide a service management function to manage proactively the availability of the solution to agreed service levels, and to provide prompt remedial action in the event of failure. All aspects of the service should be compliant with the relevant security, information management and regulatory requirements. All bids must provide dark fibre (or equivalent) gigabit-capable fibre circuits that meet the requirements described in requirement 1 of the Volume 2 requirements document. The B end connection must be to a point of presence that is directly or indirectly accessible to typical WAN suppliers, so that the circuits may be quickly, cost effectively and practically integrated into the Customers’ WANs. The circuit must be maintained in usable condition, available to the customer for a period of at least 20 years. The supplier will hold a separate contract with each customer, so that this procurement is expected to result in ten separate contracts. However, the contracts will be almost identical, other than in respect of the sites that they cover.