Agencies can choose to buy comprehensive, global telecom services through , which is held by AT&T, Qwest and Verizon Business, or ala carte services through , which is held by AT&T, Level 3, Qwest, Sprint and Verizon Business.

GSA says it's not sure how much money the largest 25 agencies have spent on Networx because they receive estimates from the agencies when orders are placed. GSA's $647 million figure is the agency's best guess of how much business agencies are planning to do on Networx right now, Krumbholz says.

"We don't have numbers for everything," Krumbholz says. But two years into the Networx program, "we're not where we thought it would be, and we're not even where the agencies thought they'd be."

GSA's Networx figures are too low because they include apples-to-oranges reporting from agencies, says Jeff Mohan, executive director of AT&T's Networx program office. "The [GSA] report doesn't show the full amount of business under Networx because different agencies report different values," Mohan says. "Some use initial value. Some may report total life-cycle value. It depends on how the agency reports it."

AT&T, for example, has announced more than $700 million in Networx awards even though the GSA's March 2009 report listed only $249 million in AT&T wins.