Proposals for CityNet under review

By Jana Cone/reporter

TIFTON July 22, 2008 07:08 pm

— A committee, charged with evaluating proposals for purchasing CityNet -- the City of Tifton’s telecommunication system -- met for two hours Monday to consider submissions from Mediacom of Valdosta and Plant Telecommunications of Tifton.
The Request For Proposals, known as an RFP, was mailed to 26 telecommunications companies in Georgia on June 10, and Mediacom and Plant submitted their proposals to the city by the July 11 deadline.
Serving on the review committee are: Carmina Turner, city finance director; Greg Sowell, city attorney; Donovan Adkisson, CityNet director; Mike Vollmer, city manager; and James Herring, city auditor.
“In the coming days they (committee members) will schedule meetings with both of the companies,” Vollmer said. “They will get with them and flesh out the details.”
The city hopes to award the contract for CityNet in late July or August and finalize the purchase within 60 days after that.
The CityNet RFP makes note of some special contractual agreements that CityNet has in place with the Tift County Board of Education and the Tift County Hospital Authority (Tift Regional Medical Center).
The RFP states that the agreement with the school system “must be carried forward and honored by the successful proposer.” Those agreements include:
• Free Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity among all current and future Tift County public school district facilities, which includes two dark fibers of access per building. Access is provided free of charge; management and maintenance is provided by the Tift County Board of Education.
• The exclusive use of an educational channel on the cable television lineup.
• Free expanded basic (no movies) cable television to each school within the Tift County public school district.
In regard to Tift Regional Medical Center, the RFP states that “perpetual free dark fiber access for the hospital” accounts for 10 percent of the evaluation factors. CityNet provides four dark fibers for data and Internet connectivity to TRMC at two separate building locations. The other evaluation factors the review committee will note include:
— the purchase price and financial stability of the company (70%)
— the perpetual free dark fiber access for 21 local government buildings (10%)
— timeliness of customer service responses and evidence of ability to operate the system (10%)
According to the RFP, CityNet has the following customer base:
• 3,279 cable subscribers
• 1,207 digital subscribers
• 2,133 high speed Internet subscribers
• 187 wireless subscribers
• 856 VOIP subscribers
The total customer count is 3,687. The system revenues for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2007, was $3,296,023.26.

To contact reporter Jana Cone, call 382-4321, ext. 208.