National Library of Medicine, Office of Acquisitions Management, Building 38A, Room B1N17, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20894

D -- TESTING OF END-TO-END INTERNET CONNECTIVITY SOL NLM 98-098/LTN DUE 091098 POC Liem T. Nguyen, Contract Specialist, 301-496-6546 The National Library of Medicine (NLM) intends to fund follow-on work to be performed by University of Southern California (USC), Annenberg School for Communication (ASC), Los Angeles, CA, to further extend and refine the testing of end-to-end Internet connectivity previously conducted for NLM. The USC/ASC methodology uses a variety of Internet performance metrics and methods to monitor the file transfer time, round trip time, packet loss, preferred network routing, number of hops, route stability, and route/hop bottlenecks of the Internet pathways being tested. In the follow-on work, NLM is requiring the vendor to use its methodology to conduct additional in-depth testing of up to six international Internet pathways between Los Angeles, CA, and selected locations in various regions of the world, including but not limited to the United Kingdom where original tests were conducted. The pathways selected will include one or more pathways to the United Kingdom, to provide comparability of results in the same geographic area, and additional pathways in other geographic areas to provide comparability among regions. The vendor will be required to conduct in-depth analysis of the testing results as was carried out in the original work. Because of the vendor's prior efforts to test and analyze international Internet pathways for NLM, and the need to directly compare follow-on test results with prior results, the USC/ASC is the only source who can successfully meet the follow-on requirements within the required time schedule. Any other source would have to duplicate the efforts already made by USC/ASC. This is a sole source acquisition. This is not a Request for Quotations (RFQ) nor is an RFQ available. ***** Posted 08/25/98 (W-SN241572). (0237)

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