Citing in part its superior response to the Galaxy IV satellite outage, the U.S. Department of Defense said it will replace Paging Network Inc. with SkyTel Communications Inc. as its paging provider for the Pentagon’s 25,000 paging users.
PageNet’s contract with the Defense Telecommunications Service-Washington-which provides the DOD’s Washington personnel (i.e., the Pentagon) with various types of communications services-expires at the end of the year. Rather than renegotiate a new contract with PageNet, the DTS-W decided to obtain paging services through its inclusion in the Federal Wireless Telecommunications Services contract negotiated by the Federal Technical Services division of the U.S. General Services Administration.
The FWTS contract, valued at $300 million, was awarded to GTE Wireless Inc. in 1996 to provide nationwide wireless services and equipment to all federal agencies and other authorized users at discounts of between 20 percent to 60 percent. According to April Ramey, director of the Federal Technical Service’s Special Services Center, the contract (which was initially for analog cellular service) was expanded to include paging services last November.
According to George Spohn, SkyTel’s director of government sales, GTE competed for a subcontract for paging services at that time, which SkyTel won. GTE is not providing paging services to the GSA through a resale agreement with SkyTel. Rather, SkyTel is providing its services directly.
Going further, Sloan said SkyTel and the DOD jointly developed a fully automated ordering and billing system that connects SkyTel’s server with the DOD’s intranet, allowing users to order pagers and service, and pay bills electronically.
DTS-W officials say the switch in providers was done for convenience and quality.
“We didn’t choose not to use PageNet. We just decided not to re-compete the contract,” said DTS-W spokesman John Maditz. However, he said SkyTel’s performance during the Galaxy IV satellite failure played a role as well. “We’re an organization that has to have service, and (the outage) had something to do with it (the transition).”
During the Galaxy IV satellite failure in May, SkyTel was the least-affected paging provider relying on that satellite. While other carriers had to reconfigure their satellite receivers to accept signals from an alternate satellite, a process that took some carriers several days to complete, SkyTel had backup receivers already configured to another satellite and made the transition in a matter of minutes. Its two-way service was able to make use of its terrestrial outbound channels to act as a backup inbound channel, causing delays in message delivery but no blackout.
“This is the Department of Defense. These people can’t afford to be without their pagers working,” said the GSA’s Ramey. “When they realized SkyTel was there and working (during the failure), it certainly was a good incentive.”
SkyTel also has a separate contract with Region 7 FTS that lasts through September 1999, which will be incorporated into the nationwide FWTS contract, Ramey said.
DOD personnel may choose to continue service with PageNet or other providers, but the department only will pay for SkyTel service. Users have until Dec. 31 to switch paging providers. Sloan declined to speculate how many of the potential 25,000 users will migrate to SkyTel’s system. Because the contract is an “indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity” type, he also said he was unable to quantify the contract’s value.
