MetTel secures $54M VA award after year-long protest battle
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By
Nick Wakeman
The company will modernize 15,000 telephone lines across 1,875 locations under this task order.
It has taken nearly a year, but MetTel has finally prevailed in its battle to secure a $54 million Veterans Affairs Department task order for modernizing VA's telephone infrastructure.
Under the contract, the company will upgrade 15,000 landlines across 1,875 VA locations by converting circuit-switched phone signals to modern IP-based systems. VA is seeking to modernize its communications capabilities.
MetTel will update both standard voice lines and specialty lines used for elevators, fire and burglar alarms, emergency 911 and call boxes, fax machines, and modems.
This is a task order under the government-wide Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract and it has been 10 months in the making.
MetTel first won the work in September 2024, but that was followed by a series of protests from competitor Granite Telecommunications. VA made two rounds of corrective actions, but each time MetTel prevailed.
Granite’s final protest went to a full Government Accountability Office decision, which backed VA's choice of MetTel in a July decision.
"This outcome demonstrates the strength of our solution and our commitment to serving federal clients," Don Parente, vice president of sales and solutions architecture at MetTel Federal, said in a release.
Among its challenges, Granite objected to how VA evaluated proposals and company argued MetTel should have had a lower technical score. In Granite's opinion, MetTel's lower price offered should have signaled that it did not understand the requirements.
GAO rejected this argument because the final solicitation specifically removed price realism evaluation requirements, meaning contractors were not required to justify potentially low bids.
On top of that, MetTel’s bid was only 1.9% lower than Granite’s proposed price.
“The protester did not provide any explanation as to why the same purported concern about MetTel’s proposal not reflecting an understanding of the requirements should not be ascribed to Granite’s own only marginally higher-priced proposal,” GAO wrote.
Because this is a task order award, Granite cannot take a protest to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.