The Masconomet Regional School District is a public, regional school serving the communities of Boxford, Middleton and Topsfield, Massachusetts.  Housed within a single structure on the campus at 20 Endicott Road, Boxford, MA 01921 are both a Middle School serving grades 7 and 8, and a High School serving grades 9 - 12.

Our district, in accordance with the process outlined by the Universal Service Administrative Company to promote open and fair competitive bidding, is seeking bids for high speed internet service. The service must be available at our location and the company must be able to provide full installation services so that it is brought to our point of demarcation in our second floor, High School data center. The vendor must be able to provide and install a modem with a standard Ethernet hand-off that can go to our Internal Networking Equipment (router/firewall). The circuit must be available at speeds at a minimum of 800 Mbps download in order to be considered. This bandwidth can be delivered in the form of up to 3 physical handoffs to our firewall. Should we need to increase bandwidth in the future, this same vendor should be able to provide that speed increase to our location. Though not required in order to submit a bid, our preference is symmetrical upload/download speeds (example.. 500 Mbps up / 500 Mbps down). Service must be in the form of broadband cable or fiber. Satellite, Microwave, T1/T3, and DSL are not reliable enough media for our mission critical environment. The service must be a dedicated "home run" from the nearest POP or CO to our location with guaranteed bandwidth and quality of service. It cannot be shared with other residences or businesses such that we lose bandwidth if another user/entity increases their utilization. The service must be a "business-class" level with the option to have at least one static, dedicated IP address and with the potential to have a group of IPs.

Bidders must have been regularly engaged in the business of supplying the services described for at least five (5) years. The District shall have the right to take such steps as it deems necessary to determine the ability of the bidder to perform their obligations under the contract, and the bidder shall furnish the District all such information and data for this purpose as it may request, including references. Past performance, withdrawal of proposals due to reckless bidding, cancellation of orders due to poor or unsatisfactory delivery, and substitutions not approved by the awarding authority may be cause for non-acceptance of proposals. The right is reserved to reject any bid, and consider a bidder non responsible, where an investigation of the available information does not satisfy the Awarding Authority that the bidder is qualified to carry out the terms of the contract.

All bidders will be evaluated in the general areas of ability to meet performance and commodity specifications, responsiveness, reliability, ability to service, quality, and cost. Any bid determined by the Procurement Officer to be non-responsive to this RFP, including instructions governing submission and format, may be disqualified without evaluation. The bidder must have a customer service department capable of responding to reports of trouble by answering the phone on the customer’s first attempt, and assigning, tracking, and closing numbered trouble tickets. The bidder should communicate proactive/known outages before performing maintenance to lines. The bidder must have the equipment and infrastructure to be able to remotely reboot a modem, and perform line tests or head-to-head stress tests as a means of diagnosing issues. They must also have available in-house field technicians, or have strong enough partnerships with larger/source carriers who do, that they can deploy such technicians to the customer’s site by noon the next business day. The field technicians should include line crews capable of working up on telephone poles, under the street in manholes, and at points of demarcation inside the buildings.

The initial contract shall be for one year commencing July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2018 in accordance with our Fiscal Year and the E-rate billing year.  Billing must occur on a monthly cycle, starting the first and ending on the last day of the month. All services should be on a single paper bill and there should be an online billing system capable of providing PDF copies of the monthly bills. There should be at least thirty (30) days between the bill issue date and payment due date, and a class/service selected for mailing the bill that gets it to Masconomet within five (5) mail carrying days from the date of the invoice. Masconomet will issue a Purchase Order to the selected Vendor after the contract has been signed by all parties. The Vendor will provide the Purchase Order number on all invoices submitted for payment against the contract. Payments will be invoiced monthly. Payment shall be made after review of invoices and any other documentation as stated above. Payment will be made in conformance with the District's warrant schedule.

Purchases by the District are exempt from Federal, State, and/or local sales and excise taxes.

Please click here to view the PDF version of this RFP.