AT&T is apparent selection to build FirstNet, as Rivada Mercury files protest over elimination from bid

Court documents include a schedule that calls for final written motions in the litigation to be filed on Feb. 16, while oral arguments in the protest case still need to be scheduled. If this schedule is met, a ruling on Rivada Mercury’s protest likely would not be made until March, at the earliest, according to multiple sources.

If the Rivada Mercury protest is denied, the FirstNet contractor award to AT&T could be announced soon after.  If Rivada Mercury succeeds in its protest bid, an award announcement would be delayed until corrective procurement procedures can be executed.

Timing of the award—with a signed deal between FirstNet and the selected contractor—is important to state and public-safety officials, because the FirstNet deployment timeline included in the request for proposals (RFP) is determined from that point. For instance, state plans are scheduled to be distributed to governors six months after the award is made, and the first phase of FirstNet buildout is slated to be completed a year after the award.

In October, pdvWireless announced that its bidding team had been removed from consideration on the same day as the Rivada Mercury consortium, which is led by Rivada Networks. During the past several weeks, Rivada Mercury officials have declined to answer when asked by IWCE’s Urgent Communications whether the bidding team received a notification that its proposal had been dismissed, as pdvWireless had announced.

While pdvWireless acknowledged its elimination from consideration in a regulatory filing just days after being informed by procurement officials, none of the companies involved in the Rivada Mercury team chose to do so. Carney noted that pdvWireless is a publicly traded company, while Rivada Networks is not.

“We informed our partners, but we didn’t have a duty to make a public declaration about it,” Carney said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

Both pdvWireless and Rivada Mercury were removed from consideration by the U.S. Department of Interior prior to the evaluation process reaching the final “competitive range” stage, which is when negotiations—known as “discussions” in the FAR—are allowed with the top bidders. In the lawsuit, Rivada Mercury claims that its dismissal from consideration was improper.

“[The U.S. Department of] Interior’s wrongful exclusion of Rivada Mercury from the competition eliminated a strong, viable competitor from this important procurement and reduced the field to a single remaining competitor,” the lawsuit states. “In doing so, Interior failed to make any reasoned or explicit determination that Rivada Mercury had no reasonable chance of being selected for award following discussions. In fact, Interior failed to conduct proper discussions as it was required to do.

“If Rivada Mercury had properly been allowed to remain in the competition, FirstNet, the nation’s first responders who will eventually be using the NPSBN, and the taxpayer would benefit from the better value gained through robust competition.”