A Tender by Pompous Clowns?

Dear Dermot,

Further to your e-mail of 2nd March 2004,

Your views have been noted and will be considered in the context of ComReg's ongoing review of regulatory
requirements.
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.
At the moment the team is busy putting together another tender for our office: We look for somebody to take care of our tippex-on-monitor problems. And here it is even harder to expand the tender document to over 10 pages. But I am confident my people will deliver again.

Yours
John

Dear Minister Dermot Ahern,

I am writing to you in connection with ComReg's tender for supply of a 1 to 2 Mb/s Internet connection and remote access implementation for tele-working, as advertised on ComReg's web-site www.comreg.ie and detailed in ComReg's pdf ITT0401

I ask you to recommend ComReg to withdraw their advertised tender, an action they are able to do (quote from tender doc: "It should be noted that the Commission reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to cancel the competition should it see fit to do so.") This 16 (!) page tender document – for a solution that could and should be implemented with minimal costs and effort by themselves – makes our Communications Regulator look like a bunch of pompous clowns with many a degree or PhD in their pockets, but very little common sense or decency with regards to financial prudence.

Drawing up this tender document alone cost more than the solution.

And this kind of tender-document is a give-away to any shark out there that these people don't have a clue about the issue and will consequently lead to consultants taking advantage on this ignorance, hiding their ploys behind nondisclosure agreements.


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


The situation is easily explained:
ComReg work with an Internet connection of 256 Kb/s at the moment, that is half the speed of (albeit contended) entry level consumer adsl broadband. They want to upgrade to something better, which is fair enough. And they want to arrange their office network connection to the Internet in a way that interested employees can access the network remotely; in other words access the office network from home as if they were in the office. This makes sense and is fashionable.

Any self-respecting small (less than 1000 employees) enterprise would easily and quickly solve the problem in a way like this:

Buy a (Cisco or other) VPNrouter (virtual private network router) at a cost of below 500 euros.
Order a fixed IP 2MB business dsl product from Eircom, EsatBt, Netsource or other at a monthly cost of below 200 euros.
Connect the office network via the VPNrouter to this Internet connection, configure ( ".. a snap with the web browser-based configuration utility") the router to accommodate the virtual tunnels for the remote access and you are done.
If you want to make sure your Internet connection has no downtime – which is not really essential in the case of ComReg, as their Internet connectivity is not mission critical – get a second alternatively delivered broadband connection like a wireless 512 Kb/s product from Irish Broadband or other at a price of less than 50 euros per month, connect it to the VPN router and voila, should your wired adsl go down, you will still have a (slightly reduced but good enough and kicking in automatically) Internet connection for the time the business dsl is being repaired. You can even use your back-haul fall-back connection all the time to maximise your normal connectivity.
Your employees who wish to telework can access the office network in a secure way via their own home Internet connection, be it dial-up, ISDN or adsl.
Email in and out works of course. (Only mention this here because it mysteriously crops up in ComReg's tender document.)


Here's ComReg's way of doing things:
Work out a pompous 16 pages document to tender for the solution of a problem that can be described in half a page and solved in half a day.
Publish the tender.
Evaluate the entrants and invite them to more evaluation and presentations.
In the end choose a mega-oversized solution that is a costly gaffe.


Yours sincerely

PW


P.S.:

What ComReg really need is something else:
They need to get a pair-gain or splitter installed in their telephone line and access the Internet through it. This is probably the only way this money wasting institution that calls itself Communications Regulator, will recognise how they are letting down the Irish public with regards to telephone line quality and Internet access. Because of ComReg's failure to regulate, tens of thousands of Irish households are on moneysaving (for eircom that is) split lines, despite paying 10 euro a month more than the European average, and do not have functional Internet access or any hope of being able to get broadband on these lines.

resources:

ComReg's original tender can be downloaded as a pfd file here.

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