WAN Emulator

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Department of Commerce, is soliciting quotations for a Wide Area Network Emulator to support Open RAN and 5G research in the CRAIN laboratory, with proposals due June 8, 2026. This is an RFQ (NTIA0000-26-00118) with no set-aside, awarded on a Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) basis as a Firm-Fixed-Price Purchase Order.

Place of performance is Boulder, Colorado 80305. The NAICS code is 334515, Instrument Manufacturing for Measuring and Testing Electricity and Electrical Signals; PSC is 6625, Electrical and Electronic Properties Measuring and Testing Instruments.

The WAN emulator must feature minimum two ports capable of 10 Gigabit Ethernet with information requested on 25GBE and 100GBE upgrade support, internal throughput up to 10GBE between ports, and a programmable API. The system must support up to 500 milliseconds delay with maximum 5-microsecond delay resolution, packet delay/loss/retransmission modeling, and network impairment traffic shaping including bandwidth throttling, latency, jitter, packet loss, packet reordering, packet duplication, packet corruption, and error insertion. The hardware must be FPGA-based with intrinsic device delay of 10 microseconds or less, support O-RAN.TIFG.TS.E2E-Test.0-R004-v08.00 test cases, PTP and SyncE passthrough, and per-stream WAN impairment independence with live throughput graphs. The procurement includes specified Small Form Pluggable layer 1 adapters and one year of minimum associated licensing and support. Hardware delivery is required within 12 weeks after order receipt to NTIA.ITS, 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado.

Quotations must be submitted in two sections: Technical Quotation (maximum 5 pages) and Price Quotation (no page limit), combined into a single electronic file in Microsoft Word, Excel (2007 or later), or searchable PDF format. Questions due date is not specified.