D--636-14-4-5066-0082 Patient Media Upgrade

The VA NWIHCS is seeking a solution to provide our patients and their families access to the wireless internet (Wi-Fi) while they are using our Nebraska facilities in Omaha, Grand Island, Lincoln, Bellevue, Holdrege, Norfolk and North Platte, as well as our facility in Shenandoah, Iowa. The VA NWIHCS is additionally seeking a solution to provide our patients and their families' access to cable television in Holdrege, North Platte and Shenandoah. The objectives of this proposal are to: 1. Provide our patients and their family's internet service at a minimum download bandwidth of 100 Mbps for Omaha, Grand Island and Lincoln; a minimum download bandwidth of 50 Mbps must be provided for all other NWIHCS sites. 2. Provide a splash screen during entry to the wireless network that welcomes users to NWIHCS internet. This guest wireless network must permit user access without username or password authentication. Proposals may include content filtering services as an optional line item number. 3. Provide access points to service wireless internet to the desired coverage areas on our facilities, as seen in our building maps (see Appendix). Wi-Fi must be provided to areas indicated on the maps or to the entire building if coverage is not specified. UniFi access points from Ubiquiti (standard model 802.211n MIMO) will be used to reduce costs for the VA. Each access point will be mounted below ceilings and wired via yellow-colored cat 5e cables to the nearest data closet. The VA will provide power and space for any vendor-provided Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches on the closet racks necessary for Ethernet line support. Switches are not required to support 5GHz frequency and must not exceed $100 per unit. Vendor must manually configure each access point within a day of mounting to provide Wi-Fi to requested areas of coverage with minimal interference between access points, evading the use of access point controllers in order to cut cost to the VA. 4. Infrastructure provided must be separate and distinct from current VA-secured wireless infrastructure in-place in the facility which is currently used for both business functions and medical devices. The Omaha, Grand Island and Lincoln campuses have existing Wi-Fi cabling and hardware that may be integrated with the new Wi-Fi system to reduce costs, based on the vendor's discretion. Fiber optic pathway drawings for the Omaha and Grand Island campuses are provided (see Appendix). In each building, fiber optic lines are mostly provided as the backbone communication between each floor, and any additional cabling must avoid "daisy-chaining" from closet-to-closet, in order to comply with the star topology wiring configuration. 5. Provide TV cable services to the VA's Holdrege, North Platte and Shenandoah sites. The cable package should at a minimum be a mixture of local and national news, popular entertainment, sports and educational channels. 6. Although this concept provides a service to our customers, it is expected that it will be provided without a requirement to provide full time, redundant, fault-tolerant service. We desire that the service be available 24 hours a day, 7 days per week (24X7); however, we are neither requiring nor expecting the supplier to provide total fault tolerance. 7. Provide services through option year pricing, where at the beginning of each option year, the VA may close out services and payments if performance falls below expectations or the VA no longer requires the services.