Bidders shall provide pricing for leased data circuits with end-to-end connectivity between the endpoints and bandwidths itemized in Appendix A. The A and Z -Endpoints for each circuit shall be at the addresses listed in Appendix A. Bidders may bid on any or all A-Endpoints but may choose to omit one or more A-Endpoints. Each A-endpoint will be awarded with their corresponding Z-endpoint. The Z-endpoints can be an existing or new NNI established at the address of the ARE-ON POP shown in Appendix-A. Alternately, the Z-endpoint may be provisioned as a point-to-point circuit. (ARE-ON prefers an NNI be provisioned but not required.) Each circuit shall provide a Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) through a Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network with Layer 2 Ethernet connectivity between the endpoints. Each circuit shall be provisioned as an ethernet data circuit with a logical Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) connection between the A-Endpoints and the Z-Endpoint. The speed of network traffic over each circuit shall be fully symmetric, that is, able to sustain transmission of data to the full capacity of the provisioned circuit in both directions simultaneously. Vendors shall not oversubscribe the bandwidth of any physical circuit to an endpoint. That is, the bandwidth provided by a physical circuit must be at least the total of the bandwidth of all logical circuit(s) provisioned over the physical circuit. All circuits will terminate into an appropriate demarcation point to a customer-owned CPE device. That is, the demarcation point for each circuit shall be the Ethernet hand-off to the CPE device at each endpoint. The physical connections at the demarcation point at the A-Endpoints (i.e., the hand-off to the Are-ON-owned CPE router) shall be 1 Gbps Ethernet utilizing single mode fiber with 10km optics. The physical connections at the demarcation point at the Z-Endpoints (i.e., the hand-off to the ARE-ON owned CPE router at the ARE-ON POPs) shall be 1Gbps or 10Gbps Ethernet single mode fiber with 10km optics. All circuits shall support transmission of Ethernet jumbo frames with a payload of up to 9,000 bytes in size. All circuits shall support 802.1Q (or dot1Q) tunneling, that is, the customer’s ability to define and preserve VLAN tags on frames transmitted over the circuit without the vendor’s provisioning or intervention. All vendor-installed equipment at the A-Endpoints shall be powered with 120 VAC. All vendor-installed equipment at the Z-Endpoints (ARE-ON POP locations) shall be powered with -48 VDC with dual A&B power supplies. All equipment installed at the endpoints shall support mounting in a 19” wide equipment rack or cabinet. Vendors shall provide a network operations center (NOC) with a toll-free telephone number that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays, with qualified personnel to handle trouble reports from ARE-ON. Vendors shall provide prompt and continuous support for emergency situations until the issue is resolved or a mutually agreeable work-around solution is implemented. Vendors shall place no limits on the number of cases or trouble tickets that ARE-ON can submit to the NOC. Vendors shall provide an escalation procedure with appropriate levels of management contacts that ARE-ON at its option may initiate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for critical outages. Vendors shall provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) as a part of the Contract that details 24x7x365 NOC availability, maximum NOC response times, the escalation procedure, and reimbursements or credits to ARE-ON in the event of an outage or outages that render a circuit unusable for an extended period of time. Vendors shall have a standard notification procedure to notify ARE-ON via email at least 48 hours in advance of scheduled maintenance and via email or telephone as soon as possible in the event of unscheduled or emergency maintenance that is impacting or may impact the availability of a leased circuit.
