Amendment 0001.pdf

Amendment 0001

The purpose of this amendment is to:

1. Publicly provide responses to inquiries posed by interested parties.

Question 1: Is there an incumbent for this work? If so, what is the contract number?

Response: No; N/A

Question 2: Is there a current project plan with deliverable dates or will the contractor support developing that?

Response: The dates are listed in the Statement of Work incorporated into the solicitation.

Question 3: The key personnel education requirements is a PhD; however, this severely restricts otherwise highly qualified candidates for this solicitation. Will the Government consider experience in lieu of education? If so, how many years of experience would be required?

Response: No

Question 4: The Acceptance of Terms and Conditions state "This is an open market solicitation for equipment..." However, in paragraph Government Furnished Property states that the Government will provide the Contractor with equipment needed in the performance of the work. Please confirm that this is a services-only requirement and that the Contractor will not be required to purchase or supply any equipment in support of this project.

Response: The requirement of for services only. Please see the revised Statement of Work attachment.

Question 5: How are we budgeting for equipment? Will NIST provide the 5G equipment or is the vendor responsible for choosing and procuring a 5G stack or will NIST specify the hardware requirements and we’ll work from that?

Response: No equipment is required for this solicitation. Please see the revised Statement of Work attachment.

Question 6: Could we just procure AWS private 5g and build off that or is the expectation to use only open-source hardware for your 5G test bed?

Response: Open source software and hardware will be provided by NIST.

Question 7: Does the team have preferred programming languages/frameworks that we build and share our code in?

Response: The contractor shall provide C/C++ at a minimum.

Question 8: Would we open source the code or would NIST own the code or are we allow to choose the license for the source code?

Response: NIST would retain all rights to all code developed from this requirement. Per the solicitation, FAR Clause 52.227-17 – Rights in Data Special Works, to be incorporated into the contract resulting from this requirement.

Question 9: Would the system be multi-tenant or single tenant?

Response: The system shall be able to operate in either of the two modes.

Question 10: Since the place of performance is Gaithersburg, MD, are you expecting the contractor to perform the required work at the NIST Gaithersburg, MD campus or would the contractor be allowed to attend weekly project meetings virtually?

Response: Please reference section V of the Statement of Work.

Question 11: The solicitation references export of configuration to and from. Would NIST be interested in terraform modules for deployment?

Response: Please reference section VIII of the Statement of Work.

Question 12: Do you have a sense of how many software engineers you are expecting to work fulltime and in parallel on this?

Response: A maximum of two software engineers are required.

Question 13: Inversely, what budget range are you expecting this to work in?

Response: The government does not reveal its estimate to interested parties.

Question 14: Do you already have implementations of DHCP and DNS server for your 5G network?

Response: Yes.