Telecommunications services

Tender description

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and fisheries harbour centres wish to put a contract in place for a primary provider of fixed voice services. Fisheries harbour centres service requirement will be based on their current ISDN and PSTN circuits. The Department of Agriculture, Food and The Marine’s (DAFM) public facing telephone systems are delivered via multiple ISDN/PRI E1 circuits. This holds for both the Departments Headquarters, Remote Offices the ‘lo-call’ contact centre services centrally hosted in the Department’s Data Centre. The Department interfaces with ‘Government Networks’ for telephony services via centrally located Quintum gateways across the ‘Multimedia VLAN’. The Department is well down the road of migrating away from traditional PBX switches to IP Telephony with over 5000 IP phones deployed on the DAFM network. However, while IP telephony is centralising the telephony infrastructure to the Data Centres, voice calls are still being delivered over the traditional ISDN/PRI circuits, both locally to DAFM offices and to the centralised ‘lo-call’ contact centre services. There are currently over 140 ISDN circuits (1422 voice channels) in use throughout DAFM in addition to a substantial number of PSTN circuits. DAFM intend moving its voice services to a SIP based service centred in its data centres in Agriculture House and Backweston, Celbridge, for all inbound and outbound traffic dramatically reducing and rationalising the number of voice channels required. It is expected that the new SIP services will be delivered over a secure private network, it should not be delivered over the public internet. A small number of ISDN circuits may be required after transition to facilitate survival remote site telephony. DAFM’s IP phone systems are currently built on Cisco’s UCCE/UCM platforms and are running version 10.5. DAFM and fisheries harbour centres wish to put a contract in place for a primary provider of fixed voice services. Fisheries harbour centres service requirement will be based on their current ISDN and PSTN circuits.