Provision of Mobile Telephony Services

Item Description:

The European Border and Coast Guard Agency, hereinafter referred to as “Frontex”, being contracting authority is planning to award the public contract referred above.

Subject

The main goal of this procurement procedure is to establish a Framework Contract for the provision of mobile telephony services for Frontex staff members and additional selected personnel. The detailed scope of services are presented in this Terms of Reference. Provision of mobile telephony hardware (mobile phones, tablets, smartphone, modems etc.) are out of the scope of this tender.

Objectives

The objectives of the Framework Contract resulting from this tender are as follow:

• To provide SIM cards with subscription plans for mobile voice, text and data services at geographically dispersed locations in the EU MSs and in other countries outside the EU.
• To provide solution for mobile services usage control, including the management of data and voice plans, configuration of services on specific sim cards and globally on the whole account, billing system and costs control tools.
• To provide a professional helpdesk that provides troubleshooting to incident notifications and service support operating on 24/7 basis.

Background information

At the moment of publication of this procedure, the following rules and facts regarding mobile telephony are in place in Frontex:

• All staff members are entitled to have a corporate mobile phone with a sim card. Other devices (laptops, tablets, modems) if allocated to staff members, may require provision of data sim card upon request. As a general rule, corporate mobile phones and other mobile equipment used by Frontex staff members are for business – related purposes. Monthly costs are subject to control and monitoring on the basis of monthly billings from service provider.
• Upon request, other categories of personnel (trainees, contractors, business partners) may also use Frontex voice and/or data sim cards. As of August 2020 approximately 8% of all active sim cards are used by these categories of personnel.
• Frontex has collective data packages for all users. It’s a shared pool of gigabytes used by all Frontex staff members simultaneously. At the same time, in the billing system internet usage is reported individually per sim card.

Frontex mobile telephony in numbers as of August 2020:

Around 90% of all sim cards are used in Apple devices (smartphones and tablets). The remaining number of sim cards is used in Android devices, laptops, modems and routers. With approximately 1050 staff members, Frontex has now around 1650 active sim cards, out of which 70 % are voice cards, 30% are data cards. In 2019 around 150 mobile numbers were transferred to new sim cards (due to technical or operational issues). Currently Frontex does not use eSIM profiles due to the lack of compatibility with devices currently in use. Frontex foresees the introduction of eSIM profiles within this new FWC, upon Frontex request.

Frontex current mobile telephony services provider is Polish mobile telecommunication operator Plus – Polkomtel. Additionally, Frontex manages several voice and data subscription plans with few local, foreign mobile telephony providers, for example in Greece and Italy. Frontex also acquires a limited number of pre-paid local mobile telephony SIM cards in other EU MSs and in selected non – EU countries.

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