The Quilt leverages the collective purchasing power of its participants to enable The Quilt community to purchase advanced network services at a lower cost.  Towards this goal, The Quilt screens and qualifies CIS vendors who meet the community’s requirements through a Quilt RFP process and then negotiates favorable pricing with Quilt-approved CIS vendors.

Specifically, The Quilt looks for vendors who, through their IP transit Internet service offerings, are willing and able to be partners in the delivery and development of research and education networks throughout the United States and who are willing to offer pricing discounts appropriate for the significant levels of bandwidth consumed by Quilt participants and their users. The Quilt Community has collectively purchased 2.6Tbps of committed commodity bandwidth from Quilt Approved Providers established from The Quilt’s 11th RFP effort in 2023.

RFP Process

The Quilt issued the 2023 IP Transit Internet Service RFP on Monday, Jan. 9, 2023 and all responses were due February 22, 2023. The Quilt has made the award to; 365 DataCenters, Arelion, Cogent, GTT, Lumen and Zayo.

• The 2023 CIS RFP can be found here.
• The 2023 CIS RFP Process Summary can be found here.

For questions, please contact Jennifer Griffin at griffin@thequilt.net.