Level 3 (NYSE: LVLT) and tw telecom (Nasdaq: TWTC) have been named as official service providers to federal agencies in the eight-state Southeast region for the General Services Administration (GSA).
Under the terms of the GRITS II (GSA Region 4 Integrated Telecommunications Services) contract, the two service providers will be able to bid on and provide communications services to support 2,000 federal government agencies in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Level 3's GRITS II seat is a fixed price with economic price adjustment (EPA) contract with a total estimated potential value of up to $285 million, including a four-year base term with six additional option years.
As a provider in all four categories, Level 3 can bid on and provide various services including colocation, CDN, Internet services, VPN, fiber-based services (dark fiber, private line, and wavelength), and managed services.
Likewise, tw telecom, which announced a seat on the GRITS II contract last month, can bid on various federal government voice, data and Internet solutions opportunities and for multisite solutions that originate within the southeast region across the United States.
Set to begin this month, tw telecom's contract with the GSA is for four years and has a potential value of $550 million. Under the terms of the agreement, there are two 3-year options to extend the terms of the contract to ten years.
Level 3 and tw telecom have been active participants in the public sector vertical. Besides GRITS II, Level 3 is on the far-reaching Networx Enterprise and Washington Interagency Telecommunications Services-3 (WITS-3) contracts.
tw telecom, meanwhile, is on GSA Schedule 70 in addition to GSA region 5, 7, and 9 Local Service Acquisition Contracts.
These awards, while slightly different in scope, come at a time when federal government agencies are looking to cut costs while moving to upgrade their network infrastructure to support various technology initiatives such as cloud.
For more:
- see the Level 3 release
- and the tw telecom release
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