Attachment 1 - Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition.pdf

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Boulder, CO 80305-3328

Attachment 1 – Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition

NB672050-20-00864

MEMORANDUM for RECORD

Date: 04/20/20

Jason Easley Contract Specialist NIST Acquisition Management Division - Boulder

Subject: Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition for

Solicitation # NB671000-20-01417

The “Broadband Demonstration Network – Deployables” project falls within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) public safety communications research portfolio. Deployable systems (DS) are considered essential to supplement and/or to fill the gaps not being covered by fixed networks. As public safety networks leverage Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and other wireless communication technologies, coverage and capacity are critical.

NIST/CTL/PSCR and John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) have been tasked by DHS to design and propose a Deployable Communications Support System (DCSS). The goal is two have two duplicate systems, one on the east coast side of the US and the other one on the west coast for the purposes of operational exercises and actual field deployments. To support this goal, DHS requires the PSCR system and the APL system be identical; they must be compatible with each other.

The local data center/LAN component is a critical piece of the DCSS system. Essentially, it acts as the central nervous center for the system. After months of collaborative DCSS design, configuration selection, and technical considerations, the Silvus StreamCaster radios were determined to be the best suited data center for the DHS DCSS. As such, both PSCR and APL will include these radios in each of the deployable support systems.