USDA, Office of Operations, POD, Rm. 1547-South Building, 14th & Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250

D -- SOURCES SOUGHT - BROADCAST TRANSMISSION SERVICES SOL NOT APPLICABLE POC Eugene Feinberg, Contracting Officer, 202-720-6864, facsimilie 202- 720-9226. This synopsis is issued to conduct a market survey in accordance with FAR 17.207 in order to determine whether it is in the Government's best interests to exercise the FY 1997 option under Contract No. 53-3142-2-1038 with Sprint Communications Company LP. The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) of the USDA is comprised of commodity and support divisions occupying approximately 200 offices located throughout the United States, including Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Approximately 90 of these offices include market news. AMS anticipates awarding a contract for broadcast services to a contractor in support of the following objective: The dissemination of time sensitive and perishable data to users and private subscribers on an equal access basis. This data, contained in market news reports, is of greatest value at the moment of its release. Reports are broadcast throughout the system where, based on subject matter, they are retained by appropriate end terminals. Broadcast services provided are in support of the Market News Telecommunications System (MNTS). This system has been in existence in one form or another for over 50 years providing information to government, industry, and private individuals about the movements, grades, and prices of agricultural commodities throughout the country. The MNTS has two main functions: sending market news reports and receiving market news reports. The proposed system must be compatible with the AMS information system hardware and software environment, including Intel X86-based PC's, the desktop operating systems MSDOS 5.0 and later versions, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT, and the network operating systems Banyan Vines and Microsoft Windows NT. The system is required to be available for use 24 hours per day 7 days per week. Reliability is the ability of any system station to be able to send and receive Market News Reports at any given time during the availability period. The MNTS requires at least a 99.8% end-to-end reliability level on a monthly basis for any site. Error free transmission of at least 99% of the reports transmitted monthly in the broadcast mode is required. The time interval between sending of a Market News Report from any office to receipt by all destination locations in broadcast mode must not exceed two minutes 95 % of the time. The remaining 5 % must be received within 5 minutes. The MNTS must be capable of delivering approximately 750 original reports per day, Monday through Friday, with an average report length of approximately 3000 characters, to all Market News Offices and private subscribers. Report line length is up to 132 characters. Reports may be up to 75,000 characters long. Receiving market news reports must be an unattended operation requiring no user intervention. Where access to the MNTS involves other than a local or international connection, this access must use the FTS2000 network. Similarly, if terrestrial routing or data transfer involves domestic intercity connections, the only permissible vehicle to accomplish this routing or transfer is the FTS2000 network. The Contractor must offer to any private subscriber in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the ability to receive and/or retrieve Market News Reports. International market news projects are taking place in Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Mexico, and anticipates extension to other Countries. Equal access to all market news reports must be offered to all potential subscribers. The broadcast delivery plan shall offer the same level of service as that provided to USDA/AMS Market News offices in terms of the ability to receive broadcasts and retrieve Market News reports. The existing Market News Telecommunications System (MNTS) is an integrated system composed of PC-based software, U.S. sprint electronic messaging, U.S. Sprint public data network services, VSAT (very small aperture terminal) satellite service, and programmable data selectors. AMS stations currently use a customized DOS version of telecommunications software provided by U.S. Sprint, PC-Sprintmail, to input reports to the system. The software is menu-driven and prompts users only for variable information, such as report numbers and commodity codes. Through local telephone lines and PC-SprintMail, the reports are automatically uploaded to the Sprintmail messaging host, via the U.S. Sprint public data network. The reports sent to SprintMail are concurrently addressed to two ''mailboxes''. First, reports are posted to a bulletin board, specified by the message originator. There are six bulletin boards - one for each market news commodity group. The reports remain on the bulletin board for five days. Users who need to retrieve reports can access the bulletin boards and scan for reports according to several variables, such as originating office or report number. Second, the reports are delivered by U.S. Sprint to the satellite service hub. From there the reports are uplinked and broadcast to all VSAT terminal locations. Satellite broadcast transmission provides an economical, fast, reliable method of delivery and makes all reports simultaneously available to all VSAT users. The market news offices are equipped with 24-inch receive-only satellite dishes, receivers, and data selectors. The data selector acts as a filter, determining which reports are to be received at each site. Reports that are received can be directed to a printer, a PC or both. Each data selector is programmable so that reports can be added or deleted from the receive list as user requirements change. Reports received by the PC are captured in a file, one file for each report. A custom TSR program provided by U.S. Sprint allows for the reception and storage of reports in a background mode while simultaneously using the PC for other tasks, such as using word processing, spreadsheet or database programs. Firms qualified to provide similar or alternate MNTS service should furnish technical and pricing data sufficient for evaluation purposes within 15 days of publication of this notice. No payment will be made for any data submitted. All data will remain the property of the Government and will not be returned after evaluation. No solicitation exists for this requirement at this time. (0215)

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