The government employment organisation has brought WAN services into the scope of the RFT, which was originally drafted to cover backbone services, metropolitan area network, mobile and remote services. The RFT was due for release on Friday October 10, however the change in scope forced the change in release date. The total value of the services provided by successful tenderers will be over AU$100 million over 5 years.
Companies successful in the tender process will be appointed to a panel that will be responsible for provisioning Centrelink's data communications needs for a period of several years. Centrelink national manager, Nico Padovan, said the RFT would provide opportunities for smaller players in the market.
"The entire Centrelink data network is now within the scope of the tender and provides an even greater opportunity for small and regional telecommunication carriers to compete for services on the panel," he said.
The announcement of the first RFT was enough to draw interest from some smaller data network providers, eager to throw their hats into the ring.
Request Broadband chief executive, Phil Sykes, last month told ZDNet Australia the company is ready to rip into the tender process.
"We clearly want to put a pretty compelling offer on the table," he said.
Industry figures speculate that Centrelink's end-game is to ditch costly point-to-point frame relay circuits in favour of DSL and Virtual Private Networking (VPN) solutions sourced from smaller outfits. Sykes said Centrelink's RFT signifies a shift in the market from a technological point of view. "There are alternatives now to just buying point to point connections," he said.
Also eager to put forward an offering is SecureTel -- the company's managing director, David Stevens said it would offer smaller companies an excellent opportunity to seize a share of the market normally dominated by big players.
"We'll have a go at that one," he said. "It's going to pull business out of Telstra, Optus, Powertel and those guys and bring it to people like ourselves, Request, Netspace and people who deal more as carriage service providers."
It may be considered "proper" to reduce the cost of telecommunications, but one only gets what one pays for - the existing Frame network is extremely relible and secure.
Break the network into smaller units with assorted networks increases the chance of failures, and increases the fault finding times.
The net result is a less reliable, greater down time, and possibly a less secure network.