State awards global services pacts

The State Department has made five indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity awards to provide telecommunications services to 50 government agencies in more than 250 countries under a 10-year contract worth up to $360 million.

The awardees are AT&T Government Solutions, Qwest Communications International Inc., WorldCom Inc., Veristar Corp. and ARTEL Inc., a small Reston, Va., firm. Each awardee may receive a maximum of $36 million per year in tasking, and tasks are competed among all five contractors.

AT&T's services under the Spectrum program, run by State's Diplomatic Telecommunications Service Program Office, will build on its Intelligent Optical Network, the company said in an announcement Dec. 12. That high-speed network service is designed to carry voice, video and data, with network switches that can automatically reroute traffic to work around equipment failures or performance bottlenecks.

AT&T's Spectrum team includes NCR Corp., for in-country service support, Spacelink for technical satellite services and TWD for operational support for intra-country services.