The Ekurhuleni Department of Planning on Monday requested that a retendering process be carried out for the roll-out of WiFi across the municipality, as only one company out of the six that submitted bids had qualified during the bidding process.

The tender called for multiple service providers for the supply and maintenance of wireless Internet infrastructure and licence frequency, which would be rolled out in several phases at over 600 sites.

Ekurhuleni Department of Planning head Liaane de Witt told municipality committee members in the municipality’s first open tender process that one of the bidders did not have any experience in the specific scope, while the other four omitted pricing items and did not fulfill the full scope of the tender document.

“It’s really important for us to award to multiple bidders offering full scope as it would provide us with the ability to allocate the vendors to different regions, allowing for risk mitigation,” she added.

De Witt suggested that the municipality only award a portion of the tender and then retender to additional bidders.

Meanwhile, De Witt also requested that the current budget be adjusted, as the department currently only had R30-million to cover the specific scope content. “We would like to make an amendment to the document to award to the value of R18-million, which will be 60% of the budget.

“This will leave R12-million to obtain additional contracts,” she noted, adding that, for the operational expenditure portion of the tender, an additional R4-million would be needed.

Ekurhuleni municipality CFO Ramasela Ganda noted that a recommendation would be issued detailing what the municipality was buying and which sites were going to be covered.

She added that the 60% bid would be awarded to the only qualifying tender but urged that the process be completed as soon as possible as the validity would end in January 2016.

The contract, which would expire in June 2018, was awarded to Bedfordview-based iMax Wireless.