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Tassie govt again turns eye to Telstra pie

The Tasmanian Government has released a request for information to aid it in developing a new strategy for the future procurement of telco services.
Written by Suzanne Tindal, Contributor

The Tasmanian Government has released a request for information to aid it in developing a new strategy for the future procurement of telco services.

The government wants to know what services carriers in the state are able to deliver and what sort of strategy they think the government should put in place for telecommunications over the next 10 years.

The telco services the government wants to purchase include fixed voice services (VoIP and analog) over one wide area network, mobile calls and data, devices (including desk phones and mobiles), contact centres, unified communications services, billing, and installation services.

The request for information has been released as part of a voice services project that hopes to see the replacement of Telstra's CustomNet Spectrum platform. That platform has provided the government's fixed voice telephony services for nearly 20 years, but is likely to be obsolete in five years, according to tender documents. The government has also recognised that there is scope to adopt IP-based telephony services across the government and to integrate disparate services to help operations.

The agreements the government has with Telstra for fixed line will expire in 2012, while the mobile telephony contracts, provided by Telstra and Optus, expire in 2014. The government fields around 10,000 mobiles, and uses around 22,500 fixed connections, according to the tender documents. When Telstra last won a telecommunications services contract with the government, it was worth $30 million for the three years until 2010.

The government has an open mind about whether it picks one supplier for all of the telco services, one supplier for each segment of telco services, multiple suppliers for different tranches, or multiple suppliers in a panel arrangement.

At this point, the government said that it would prefer to have a single supplier.

The government also hopes that the new strategy will help with its ICT services transformation being carried out by TMD, a Division of the Department of Premier and Cabinet which delivers telecommunications and computing services for the Tasmanian Government.

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