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WASHINGTON—The U.S. Army, the Air Force and the Defense Telecommunications Service – Washington have teamed up to award a huge new contract for wireless services to Cingular Wireless.
The new contract, which consolidates a number of existing military wireless contracts into a single procurement vehicle, is valued at about $150 million over the five years of the contract.
The new blanket purchase agreement includes push-to-talk services, BroadbandConnect and BlackBerry services. In addition, the new Cingular contract will support a number of secure calling services.
The new Cingular wireless service will also include a new government Web portal that can be used by government managers for managing wireless accounts. Cingular says that it has agreements with over 1,200 federal, state and local agencies. Its phones and other devices use the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard, which will allow the military to use them worldwide.
The new contract will give the government a single pricing structure for phones and other devices, accessories and services, and will give managers more information and more management capability that was available previously.
Current contracts cover about 50 thousand subscribers, according to the company.