ComReg's tender

eircomtribunal

"ComReg's tender document is an involuntary piece of farce that not even the ComWreck crowd could have dreamt up."

Read the full story here

Peter

dahamsta

"I have passed on your comments in relation to our tendering process. Our team dealing with the tender will be looking at the issue in due course and let you know why your suggestions are ridiculous."

LOL

spongebob

In a nutshell

1. We want a leased line greater than 256k (we are greedy bastards )
2. We want availibility of 100% (not 99.9% like a 256k line)
3. Contract period 1 year from April 2004

Tenders please .

I'm glad they took 16 pages to say that, I would hate to think that Comreg functioned in the real world.

M

shoegirl

I've been reading through the details of the tender since I work for a company that provides services to much larger UK public sector organisations (for example, we are one of the winners of the ePOS rollouts) and I am highly amused.

For a start there is only 2 weeks to tender - in other words, you have less than a week to build your bid. Secondly its only a one year contract - most contract are about 5-7 years. Thirdly, the 1MB link wanted is really very tiny by any standards. We use a 34MB link as a BACKUP for one of our main customers in the UK!
Lastly there is less than 2 weeks from the time of winning the contract to implementing it.

In other words - basically the only company who could win this is the one already providing the services as it is neither feasible or worthwhile for anybody else. Yes, it is a sham.

Capt'n Midnight

It's for a link of over 256K with ISDN or ADSL fallback

Number of paragraphs 509
Number of words 3995
Number of characters 27653

If the equipment is already in place (they do have an internet connection, don't they ?) then the rental amount in Euros could be closer to the number of words in the doc than the number of characters in it..

All sounds like the sucessful tender will be ring-fenced - but Comreg would have to sign the ISP's standard Terms and Conditions ....

DMT

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
If the equipment is already in place (they do have an internet connection, don't they ?)

I know for a fact that their internet connection is the slowest pile of poo you could ever experiences. Their pings are something like 5 seconds....

jd

ha
2.2.3 Reliability
ComReg would like to consider the following options in terms of
reliability/redundancy and support:-
• Solution to achieve 100% up time during normal working hours
using redundant failover solution with option to extend to 24*7


Anybody who guarantees "100% up time during normal working hours" is a liar, tbh.
Excellent engineering practice goes by the 5 9s I believe. 99.999% uptime.
This equates to less than 2 minutes of downtime per year (during working hours).
4 9s would be about 20 minutes of downtime over a year.
TBH who would notice if they were down for that long- they are going to pay a bucket of money for an over-engineered solution for their needs.
The money would be better spent elsewhere rather than on thsi kind of mickey-waving. Do any qualified engineers work for COMREG, I wonder (ok there are-but this tender is silly)?

Maybe Mr Ahern should be told how ridiculous this is- even vastly more important equipment in the health service compared to COMREG's internet connectivity would not have 100% availability.

yellum

Originally posted by jd
Do any qualified engineers work for COMREG, I wonder ?

They do, but they are probably not in charge of policy. That jobs falls to Eircom.

DMT

Originally posted by jd
Do any qualified engineers work for COMREG, I wonder?

There are at least 6, most of them are managers.... I have no knowledge of any of those covering Internet/Telco policy though...