West Virginia Buys $22K Routers With Stimulus, Puts Them In Small Schools

DesScorp writes "The Charleston Gazette is reporting that the state of West Virginia has purchased hundred of enterprise class routers from Cisco at over $22,000 dollars apiece via federal stimulus money. The stimulus cash was intended to spread broadband coverage. The problem is that the routers are overkill, and are being placed in small schools and libraries with just a handful of users. The West Virginia Office of Technology warned that the purchase was 'grossly oversized' for the intended uses, but the purchase went through anyway. Curiously, the project is being headed up not by the state's usual authorities on such matters, but by Jimmy Gianato, West Virginia's Homeland Security Chief. In addition to the $24 million contract signed with Verizon Network Integration to provide the routers and maintenance, Gianato asked for additional equipment and services that tacked an additional $2.26 million to the bill. Perhaps the worst part is that hundreds of the routers are sitting in their boxes, unused, two years after the purchase."

Comments

How the money could better have been spent

[John.Banister]

I've been visiting with my parents here in WV and saw that story in the local paper a few days ago. I have to believe that someone had a buddy getting a commission, because that's how it generally goes here. I remember seeing this map a couple weeks before and can't help but think it'd be a better option for spreading broadband.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[PPH]

this map

Looks like the meme of the Internet routing around damage is alive and well.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[cpu6502]

Why not just mandate that all telephone companies MUST offer DSL to any customer that asks (in the same way government mandates companies must provide phone service). Instant broadband coverage to everybody who wants it.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[jythie]

Because then people scream 'communism' and rewrite history to pretend that the regulation that resulted in everyone having phone access didn't work and didn't provide a massive economic boost to the country.

Though it would be far form 'instant', a massive amount of infrastructure needs to be built, but there is a game theory element to it where telcos are generally hoping one of their competitors makes the investment instead.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[sjames]

In that case, I want my 'universal access' fees back.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

Because as soon as you get 18000 feet from the CO, you hit a loading coil, which kills DSL. Your mandate would require installing (and powering) DSLAMs essentially within 3 miles of any customer. Plus the back haul routers, power feeds, and other ancillary gear. Add it up, spread it around, you'd blow through the money spent on those WV routers pretty quick.

Which is not to say WV got the right routers for its needs. The 3945 ISR is an enterprise class machine, with capabilities to do things the WV libraries would never need. Cisco makes a number of SOHO routers that would have been perfect for what WV wanted for a lot less. (And in the article in Ars Technica, a Cisco sales rep essentially said so. That article said it was a reseller - Verizon Network Integration - who sold WV these routers, not Cisco themselves.)

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

DSL != Broadband

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[uigrad_2000]

You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons. You, obviously, do not understand DSL.

When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason. With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.

Unlike basic phone lines, DSL performance is extremely sensitive to the distance from the CO.

If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.

If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this exact thing happen with just about every school that I had contact with while serving as Tech Director of a k-12 school district.
I believe that people forget where the govt gets their money from and just think that it's free money.

It doesn't even have to make sense, believe me if schools could get hundreds of chauffeured limos for free to replace their buses, they would do it, because after all it's "free", and for some reason it doesn't matter how stupid of an idea it is.

In my case, I had to fight to get equipment that was reasonable for the job in place of millions of dollars worth of equipment that was overkill in the extreme for all the schools i was in charge of. We actually had meetings where we were yelling at each other because I thought putting a $60,000 switch into a school that only had 200 students was a waste of tax payers money. I was just told repeatedly that if we were going to get it for free, or almost free that we should take as much as we could get.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[LordLimecat]

Because what you propose is a technical impossibility?

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

We have DSL here, but it's somewhat limited and intermittent owing to the path it takes getting to Pittsburgh. Incidentally, for a long time (and perhaps still) the fastest, most reliable internet connection in this small town is the one for the exclusive use of the West Virginia Lottery.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[LordLimecat]

In the common parlance and most widely understood definition for this context, it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Wolfraider]

FYI, you can use repeaters to overcome this. Centurylink has used a few repeaters to get DSL out in my area for only $50 a month. Grated the speed is only 1.5mb but I will take that over satellite any day. I live 12 miles from town or around 9 miles from the closest DSLAM.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[f0nZi3]

Well, Jimmy's one great accomplishment was making it legal for us to brew beer at home. :-)

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[sir-gold]

It's funny how the DSL providers will swear up and down for years that they can't get DSL or fiber into your area. Then one day, they hear that the city itself is planning to roll out city-wide broadband, so the DSL company is "suddenly" able to serve your area, and sues the city for unfair competition.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care/

Take a company, any company at all, and give them the choice between money and truth, they will ALWAYS pick money.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[reboot246]

Thus the budget deficits at all levels of government. That's okay, though, just keep raising taxes until you kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

The geese are almost dead now.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[daemonc]

Or they could spend more on training and education so we don't end up with someone who is "not an expert on the technical side" running our state broadband deployment program...

This small organization has started 60 public computers, equipped with 10 computers each, loaded them with Open Source software, provided a free curriculum, and trained hundreds of computer mentors - all for 1/8 the cost of these routers...

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Arker]

A common *misuse* of the term, as your own link makes adequately clear.

Precise language isnt free, it has to be defended, and it is worth defending.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost?!? Dude man, have you looked at the debt increases for the past decade? Those geese died years and years ago, the government is just trying to ignore the fact.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[kaladorn]

The government is the only place I can think of where the people who spend the money are the same people who can arbitarily decide how much to take from their customers (taxpayers) without any recourse.

Of course, in such a system, such abuses are going to transpire regularly.

A more interesting question I haven't seen asked: Is it possible DHS asked for more pricey equipment and that the schools complied because the higher-end units implement more of the latest monitoring and security support? CALEA and other such measures.

Some of the cheaper units may not allow DHS to tap or to disable systems as easily or quickly. Each newer generation seems to add more of this sort of capability to the switches.

(I can't speak authoritatively to broadband switches, but I can speak to cellphone networks and their policy enforcement and AAA services, where this sort of thing is definitely always getting more capable without much public fanfare).

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that people forget where the govt gets their money from and just think that it's free money.

More likely there are restrictions on how money can be spent. For instance our university signed a contract with Granger so all purchases for Maintenance Repair Operations (MRO) must be purchased through this vender instead of McMaster Carr where we can get stuff for half the price. The state of West Virginia probably has Oracle as a preferred vender by law.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[dgatwood]

The solution for this, of course, is fiber to the curb, rolled out by the local community, but the telcos tend to sue for unfair competition whenever they try to roll it out.

Alternatively, the telcos could quit being cheap and replace their load coils with coils that have a wider passband. They've been in existence for at least a decade now.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[silas_moeckel]

You know all those small ugly boxes they have been strapping to poles for the last 20 years that is the new CO. It's technically possible just not necessarily profitable this year or this quarter and that's all they are concerned about.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[cusco]

Do you really think it's that easy? You must be a lawyer, your grasp of technology is a bit thin. In my neighborhood they'd have to rip out all of the existing buried telecom infrastructure and upgrade it, and drop a switching station in the middle of us. Not everyone lives in a new community with the latest in technological infrastructure.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Eravnrekaree]

Combined with the fact that many people have little idea about Tech and what they actually need. Someone probably was suckered by a salesman into buying these, because, they didnt know any better. They didnt know you could use some used PCs from 2002 which are perhaps available for free, or at most some $200 barebones systems, running Linux, with dual NICs costing $20 or so, would do the job just fine.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[cusco]

Actually that capability has been available in even the mid-level Cisco equipment for over a decade, if the customer were willing to pay for it. I doubt DHS, no matter how ignorant their leadership might be, would bother with monitoring at the level of schools and libraries when they're already hooked into the ISP's backbone.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[chebucto]

That map (or rather, that webpage) is very well put-together. Clearly WV has people of sufficient caliber to see what's needed and to plan on how to achieve it. Let's hope those people are given the resources they need to build their network.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[im_thatoneguy]

I sometimes wonder if the voters aren't doing the same.

It seems like those who really hate government and don't think it can accomplish anything... find their way into government in such areas.

I can't imagine anyone in West Virginia is a "big government" liberal. Probably because they have absolutely no clue how to properly run a civic organization.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[LordLimecat]

If you want to be perpetually misunderstood by sticking to a technically correct-- and also woefully archaic by now-- definition, thats fine. Language changes, and while sometimes regrettable, you arent going to communicate more clearly by insisting that DSL isnt broadband.

Particularly when technically it COULD be considered broadband. Consider:

The standards group CCITT defined "broadband service" in 1988 as requiring transmission channels capable of supporting bit rates greater than the primary rate which ranged from about 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s.

Dunno, Im pretty sure DSL meets that standard, at least under ideal circumstances.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Arker]

You can get a shill 'standards group' to define anything you want as anything else, as long as there is a profit to be had. They dont own my brain, and they dont own yours either unless you let them. Marketing is a plague and abdicating your understanding of your language to those leeches differs from simply lobotomising yourself only in degree.

Broadband has a precise meaning, one that is clearly indicated by the word itself. Broad and band. NOT fast and band, notice. Broad and fast are entirely different concepts. Forget about computers for a second, look at water. You can have a broad river which is relatively slow, a narrow one that is very fast, etc.

Using 'broad' to mean 'fast' is ridiculous. Semantic hygiene is important, and that misuse is positively filthy. Poor semantic hygiene inevitably erodes the ability to think clearly and should be avoided for that reason alone. Broad and fast simply are not the same thing, and any usage that implies otherwise is therefore simply wrong. I dont care how many marketdroids you pay to chant otherwise.

And, btw, completely contrary to the implication in your first paragraph, I speak with non-technical people who misuse this term every single day and I have never been misunderstood. Quite the contrary, I get excellent marks for my ability to communicate clearly with extremely technically challenged people on a daily basis. When they say they have "broadband" I ask a question and find out what they actually meant, and restate it properly without making any fuss about it. This works great.

On the other hand I have seen colleagues who are not careful with their semantic hygiene regularly having misunderstandings because of it! When one side of a conversation doesnt know what they are talking about, the other side can compensate, but when NEITHER side can even think clearly about the subject... communication problems should be no surprise.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[m1xram]

Voters are longing for the day of the $600 hammer.

West Virginia hosted the Kind of Pork, Sen Robert Byrd. The ex-Klan leader skimmed billions for WV, here's the list.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[sociocapitalist]

You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons.

Like chemical manufacturing, medicine and pharmaceuticals to name a few? Should these be unregulated perhaps? Politicians are politicians and they're not going to understand just about any industry and yet legislation is requires for the benefit of the country as a whole.

You, obviously, do not understand DSL.

You obviously do not understand DSL as there is no technological reason that DSL can't be deployed just about anywhere that humans live. It is strictly a cost issue as you do mention below.

When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason.

And that reason is of course profit or lack of profit for the company involved.

With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.

Yes and like any other infrastructure that benefits the country and society it should be deployed even when it one instance of it is not profitable as the entire deployment remains profitable. The money they make off the 99% of people where deploying infrastructure is low cost (I'm admittedly pulling this number out of nowhere) will still more than make up for whatever it costs to deploy DSL (or any other form of Internet access if they prefer, i.e. leased line as the real issue is equal access to the Internet and all the benefits that come with it) in the areas that are high cost.

Unlike basic phone lines, DSL performance is extremely sensitive to the distance from the CO.

If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.

If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.

Not price fixing but price standardizing where people pay the same amount for the same service from the same provider regardless of where they happen to live. If people living in the rich neighborhood of a major city only have to pay X dollars for service then the poor people who can't afford to live there should arguably also only have to pay X dollars for the same service. The company involved spreads the cost of deployment of a given area and calculates the revenue from a given area - the only thing changing would be the size of the area involved in the calculation.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[aix tom]

But that is just the " DSL is Broadband" direction. Which is somewhat technical correct.

It's the "Broadband is DSL" direction that is wrong, why "everybody should get DSL" is wrong. For far-out customers fibre or probably even a long-rage wifi link will be the cheaper option. The mandate should be "Everybody should get $BITRATE at least".

And the companies shouldn't probably even be forced to actually do it, they should just lose the right to sue for "Unfair competition" in an area when they can't offer it to everybody that wants it.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[bruce_the_loon]

Our Telkom telco is deploying in-streetbox micro-dslams all over the place, so they do exist and are cheap enough.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in the same position. People said it was overkill. Blah. Blah. It's overkill until they want multiple remote classrooms. Each remote classroom has ~5 h.264 feeds to do it properly. The minimum - 720p resolution, 30 frames per second is ~2Mbits/s/h.264 feed; that's ~10Mbits/s for each room minimum. Laggy connections don't cut it. Honestly at the minimum, that's a shitty looking picture in a classroom setting. Now handle all the other traffic, backups, and intranet apps on the same connection. Now do it all yourself. That's right all the updates, backups, training, everything. You DO NOT have time to be fucking with shitty network connectivity. You do not have time to hope and pray you will be able to upgrade your 20 year old 10Mbit network "next year". You take it when you can get it.

Don't forget they want to rearrange all of the rooms every year. Good luck getting money after the fact to rewire the building. You obviously lived in a district with a good tax base. Try doing it in a district where there is NO tax base. These grants only come every ~10-20 years. You HAVE TO plan ahead. I your nice cozy case you are guaranteed to get money every year. You are guaranteed teachers to be there.

Now once you have it and you don't utilize it, that's a different story.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Green Salad]

was suckered by a salesman... How utterly sexist of you to think only MEN can sell Cisco gear. To pull this off, I'll bet the salesgirl was fscking hot.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Richy_T]

"Arguably" in what sense of the word? Should they also have their gas subsidised to their transportation costs are the same?

Abd you say "happen" to live. as if it's something that people have no choice on. Whilst there occasionally are circumstances which trap people, in the vast majority of places, location of residence is a choice and millions of people can and do move every year.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[ewok85]

If it is anything like Australia, that only applies to voice services.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[ewok85]

Google Telstra CMUX - the Australaian incumbent has been installing mini-Dslams in street side enclosures with fiber back haul for over a decade now. It's not rocket science.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[sjames]

If they're going to (in theory) claim it failed, then I would be owed a refund for non-performance.

In the U.S. the Universal Service Fund is in transition to the Connect America Fund which also covers broadband connectivity.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[sociocapitalist]

Yes, children can 'happen' to live somewhere where they are born. Additionally, people shouldn't have to give up their homes in order to have reasonable access to something as important as the Internet just so that the corporation(s) in question can have a bit more profit. The corporation wants to make money by providing a service then they can provide that service to everyone who needs it. Win-win. If they don't want to then they don't have to provide it at all.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[sociocapitalist]

Also at no time did I propose any form of subsidy which is why I didn't bother to answer your other question.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Anonymous Coward]

if jimmy was running, i would vote for him

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[uninformedLuddite]

Is there something special that these routers do that cannot be achieved with a much cheaper alternative? If so, what is it?

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[Chris6502]

They do a great job. We host one of the centers at the local firehouse and it's kept pretty busy.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[cpu6502]

>>>Because then people scream 'communism' and rewrite history to pretend that the regulation that resulted in everyone having phone access didn't work and didn't provide a massive economic boost to the country.
>>>
I've never heard anyone say that, except environmentalists, and their argument is usually "the government should not encourage suburban/rural sprawl with these mandates".

>>>Though it would be far form 'instant', a massive amount of infrastructure needs to be built

A couple fiber optic lines (which the 1996 telecommunications act provided money to buy) and DSL-AMs in neighborhoods where somebody requested DSL. That doesn't sound massive to me.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[cpu6502]

Funny how the Japanese make it work. They use almost nothing but DSL, and they are the world's 3rd fastest country in speed (average per person). And yes I understand there's a cost but the corporations can afford it. They could just bump-up the prices in the dense city blocks with ~1000 customers each, in order to subsidize the 1-2 DSL customers in West Virginia valleys.

Re:How the money could better have been spent

[PPH]

Same holds true in business. If you don't like a project, you don't fight it. You get assigned to it. Then you fuck it up.

Actually works better if you can get a (stupid) buddy or one of your minions to do the dirty work. He/she either gets canned or you are in a position to defend them*.

* Ever wonder why so many people seem to screw multiple things up and still hang around?

WVa needs tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Growing up in WVa, I can tell you it needs all the tech it can get.

Re:WVa needs tech

[sneakyimp]

I haven't spent much time there, but would have to agree with this one. What puzzles me is not that WV has fucked something up, but that they had so much money to spend. Poor, poor WV.

That hurts my stomach a little...

[randombilly]

Wow! Thats an enormous waste of money! They make $22,000 routers? What could they possibly do that like an Airport Extreme can't? heh.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you apparently don't know much about professional networking and IT. They make multi-million dollar routers and they weigh about a ton and a half (literally) and stand over 7 feet tall. They do a lot more than your airport extreme.

Now that being said, I'm guessing these are ASR 1000 routers in this price range which puts them very much into the overkill. A Cisco 2911 or even 1941 router would work in most of the applications. Then get one ASR for aggregation.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, $22K isn't that bad for a decent edge router. It looks to me like a Cisco 7603, so with a service contract, that's not really that bad of a deal. If they wanted to standardize on Cisco/Juniper/Brand X equipment though, you are very much right that this is definitely overkill. A simple ASA 5505 or a 800 Series Cisco would of been much better to use and costs about $1K with allot of bells and whistles.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[gl4ss]

cisco will sell you as expensive router as you're willing to pay for. there's no upper limit.

of course those routers do actually nothing for spreading broadband coverage.. washington should slap them for misusing the funds.

"Looking at how technology evolves, we wanted something that was scalable, expandable and viable, five to 10 years out. We wanted to make sure every place had the same opportunity across the state." - fucking dimwits. 22k in it equipment budget spread over 10 years would have done wonders to some libraries and schools. buying 22k routers without immediate use for them -if one actually had looked at how technology evolves- is stupid.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Krojack]

Buying Airport Extremes would have tacked on another $1 million for the lot just because they have the Apple logo on them.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[OrangeTide]

(even though I know you're not serious, I'll still answer the question)
1. capacity - route more packets. switch more MAC addresses. hold larger routing tables. gigabit and 10-gigabit
2. reliability - your airport extreme is not even six-9's, nor can it support any sort of hot failure.
3. expandability - add different short distance and long distance fibre interfaces though GBIC. (10GBASE-SR/LR/LX4/ER/etc)
4. administration - support routing and configuration protocols. support self-healing networks.

In terms of the school's actual need. an Linksys/D-Link/Airport Extreme/etc is probably sufficient. Although for IT friendly and flexible a RouterBoard is pretty good and not much more expensive (around $300 for one with a lot of gigabit ports or with good WiFi antennas and outdoor mounting).

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[lightknight]

The only key piece of information you need to know is that they are Cisco routers; that explains everything.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I'm thinking, I didn't know Cisco had routers with service for that low of a price. If they got that with with installation and configuration included that is even better.

I think we just dropped 30k+ for two 3750 switches because we needed POE.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[hawguy]

The only key piece of information you need to know is that they are Cisco routers; that explains everything.

Not really - Cisco may be expensive, but it doesn't need to be *that* expensive. If they really do want to get 5 - 10 years of lifetime out of them, going Cisco is not the worst choice.

You may say "Bah, just buy a Netgear and replace it when it fails", but schools and libraries often don't have the staff to do that, in 2 years their current IT Admin is not going to have any idea how the router was set up by their previous admin.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[SgtAaron]

Wow! Thats an enormous waste of money!
They make $22,000 routers? What could they possibly do that like an Airport Extreme can't? heh.

Screw that. I just told my boss about this story and he imploded. We've been deploying MikroTiks to many
remote sites and they never bat an eye (although we sometimes prefer to run OpenWRT on them instead of
dealing with RouterOS). At around $80 a piece, they could have saved nearly $24 million dollars. Add
some additional cost for something cheap that interfaces with their T-1's. Ah, they should have got all the
fiber ready and then bought something much cheaper that would interface with it. $24 million of OUR MONEY.
Thank you WV.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[sjames]

I'm pretty sure he meant WiFi routers, not core routers.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Lorens]

Honestly, $22K isn't that bad for a decent edge router. It looks to me like a Cisco 7603, so with a service contract, that's not really that bad of a deal.

Article says Cisco 3945, which at least is marketed as a client-side router. If they're supposed to go to Gbps fiber, a case could be made. It would be full of holes, of course.

Incidentally, searching for cisco 3945 on the net gives https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2146460 which seems to be the reporter behind TFA looking for background.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[pLnCrZy]

Wow, I'll bet whoever you buy your Cisco gear from loves you.

Next time you're out shopping, stop by Best Buy and pick up some $400 HDMI cables and a few extended warranties.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[StuartHankins]

They come with a set of Monster Cables...

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[thomasw_lrd]

What we're forgetting is that this was a grant from the federal govt. They had to spend however much they got, or they coudln't get another grant again.

I used to live on Air Force Base, and they would repave the roads every year to make sure every dime was spent. Then they took out all the roads, and tore down the houses to build a park. I'm sure they eventually tore out the park, and rebuilt the houses, and continue to repave the roads every year.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[LordLimecat]

Absolutely they have cheaper routers for SMBs, like the 1800. Theyre about $1000.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[LordLimecat]

Washington should keep its mouth shut, since this is an in-state affair.

People seem to sadly forget the 10th amendment and that there are matters that the fed has no say in.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[I Read Good]

Yeah? I live in WV, and I'd like to slap them for misusing the funds...

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[denobug]

Washington should keep its mouth shut, since this is an in-state affair.

People seem to sadly forget the 10th amendment and that there are matters that the fed has no say in.

Not if you are using federal funding. The hand that feeds you always has a say on how to use the money (or not giving you any). I'm sure there is clause in accepting the funding to not abuse or mis-appropriate it.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[DesScorp]

Washington should keep its mouth shut, since this is an in-state affair.

People seem to sadly forget the 10th amendment and that there are matters that the fed has no say in.

The money came from Federal stimulus programs... tax dollars at large. That makes it a federal issue.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Grishnakh]

If we're talking about small schools, the Linksys/etc. is superior because of #4 administration. I have a couple of Cisco Aironet APs, and these things are not easy to set up; consumer-level gear has a simple web interface and is very easy to set up by someone who's not a network engineer. Cisco gear is not; you need to figure out their crazy and arcane command-line interface. My APs have a web interface, but it really sucks, unlike my Linksys/Cisco E4200 which is easy. Now of course, that arcaneness has an upside: you can do all kinds of things with these Aironets that you could never do with a Linksys: set it up with a RADIUS server (or use the internal one), set up a bunch of different BSSs, etc., but that takes someone who knows what they're doing. These are supposed to go in small schools in West Virginia; small rural schools don't have network engineers on-site to manage such equipment. Joe Bob the local tech can figure out a consumer-grade router's UI easily enough, but you don't want to give him a top-of-the-line Cisco box to figure out.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[jkauzlar]

Your un-nuanced reading of the 10th amendment is interesting, but note that this money was given to them BY WASHINGTON as part of the stimulus package. That said, the feds can't complain if they didn't attach conditions to the money in the first place. And they won't, because they don't care and they don't have a reason to care.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[cusco]

AMEN!

I have basic networking knowledge, but nothing in-depth and shudder at the very thought of programming in IOS. We set up a customer a couple of years ago with a Linksys R-16. Sitting down with the help file and the web interface in three hours I was able to set them up with 1) two VLANs, 2) firewall, 3) DHCP, 4) DNS forwarding, 5) a DMZ (that they didn't use) and 6) PPTP remote access. Our Cisco vendor had bid on the same job and not only came in with a far, far more expensive piece of equipment but told us that we would need a CCN-something for five hours to program the thing.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're describing is just more of the same of what makes the WV story so infuriating: bureaucratic waste.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like an ignorant hillbilly

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Cramer]

The 1800 line (except the 1861 -- small office voip/call manager) is EOL. You cannot buy them new. (in fact most of the [123]800 line is EOL)

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[LordLimecat]

But ironically (?) I live in washington.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[LordLimecat]

That depends. If I give you $5 with the understanding you will buy a beverage, but am upset when I find out you bought beer, generally you can tell me to get bent.

There is no indication given that accepting the money made WV beholden to the fed for approval for its purchases, which is why I made the statement I did-- that the fed has no say once the money has been handed over. Its between WVa and its taxpayers now.

I know we like to pretend those last two Bill of Rights amendments arent there, but they ARE, I promise.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[LordLimecat]

but note that this money was given to them BY WASHINGTON as part of the stimulus package.

Ah, and one of the conditions of that money was that WV forfeits all of its local sovereignty over internal affairs? They must have been really desperate.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pretty good racket. Force people to pay federal taxes, then force them to spend it in ways they wouldn't want.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Grishnakh]

The only way I was able to get mine set up reasonably fast (with LEAP) was because I was able to call a Cisco networking expert at my company (I use them for work). These Aironets certainly have a lot of potential, but easy to use for laymen they absolutely are not.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[adolf]

That depends. If I give you $5 with the understanding you will buy a beverage, but am upset when I find out you bought beer, generally you can tell me to get bent.

Indeed. The root of the problem is that it is made plain from the proposals from Washington that $x is available combined with a more localized mindset that if $x is not fully exploited, that "money was left on the table" and elections are lost/promotions are skipped/"we'll never get $x again, because the last time they gave us $x, we didn't use it all."

If you give me $5 for "beverage," it's certainly OK for me to buy some high-dollar spring water, or a latte, or a couple of 40's, or a single 9-ounce bottle of Trappist ale.

The need I have for a beverage that you intend to satisfy for me by giving me $5 may easily met by a $.99 bottle of water, or a $1.50 cup of coffee, or a single $0.99 24-ounce can of Labatt Ice. The problem is, as things stand, there's no advantage to anyone to give the remainder back, or just leave it on the table, at least in the scale of TFA.

None. Zero. Zilch.

If you give me (literally) $5 to procure a beverage for myself (which may be reasonable sum these days, sadly), and I'll buy a beverage with that and bring you back the change, because that's the right thing to do. And if I don't bring back the change, it's really not a big deal: It's just five bucks. Life moves on, and beverages are consumed.

But if you give me (again, just as an example) $5*1,000,000 and tell me to make teh Intarwebs happen, you can bet your ass that I will spend at least$5,000,000 making that happen. Because, simply: If it really only costs $250,000, I have to give back $4,750,000, and that makes for ugly headlines: "Head of new broadband initiative turns away millions in new rollout."

Why? Because The alternative headline of "$LocalArea gets $5,000,000 for new broadband rollout" sounds so much more....marketable, unfortunetely.

If there is any answer for this problem, I'm all ears.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Lorens]

Our Cisco vendor had bid on the same job and not only came in with a far, far more expensive piece of equipment but told us that we would need a CCN-something for five hours to program the thing.

Sure, but if you have 1000 of them you'll need at least one competent full-time tech anyway, and I can guarantee that someone experienced (i.e. knowing Cisco) who has 1000 client routers will prefer the 1000 routers to be Cisco. That's not the question, actually.

To get back on topic, he'd prefer $500 Ciscos, or $1000 Ciscos. The $22,000 Ciscos can go route the university campuses they were designed for instead of taking up space and ELECTRICITY in 1-5 console libraries. Say two or even four each, but I doubt there are 250 universities in WV, am I right?

Some guy interviewed linked from the TFA said it was buying Lamborghinis. The comparison is not quite correct. Instead of buying bog-standard five-seater consumer cars, these people bought new 18-wheeler long-haul Kenworth trucks with three seats and paid extra to have two beds in the back of the coach, justifying the choice by saying maybe one day they'd need more luggage space. Maybe they got a good price for what they bought, but it was a little bit overkill for a thousand parents to bring their kids to school.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[jandrese]

Isn't that why you have a "tech guy" in the government who gets the admittedly crappy job of maintaining all of that equipment, driving out to each library when they have a problem and fixing/replacing their router.

The configuration shouldn't require a BA in network administration. It's a T1 endpoint with a switch on the end. Maybe there is a VPN set up to some central location, but it's pretty basic stuff.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[Anonymous Coward]

RouterBoard is vastly superior to LinkSys. Especially if you want to set up different types of meshes or authentication. You can use RADIUS or AD or a number of other mechanisms.

You're probably just used to Linksys and think it's good enough.

Re:That hurts my stomach a little...

[gmhowell]

But ironically (?) I live in washington.

Interesting that you felt the need to correct AC's assumption about your place of residence, but not your ignorance.

sounds like a contractors / sub contractors mess

[Joe_Dragon]

Workers just showed up and installed the device. They left behind no instructions, no user manual.

WTF

[bonch]

The most hilarious part is when Gianaro defended it in the name of " equal opportunity"' : "A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students."

WTF? Does he really thing the technology works like that...the bigger the router, the bigger the opportunity?

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how Verizon structured this? Did they provide, say for example, gigabit circuits to all the locations and the routers to match or did they just deliver a bunch of big routers and gave some of the locations a T3 and the larger locations get bigger pipes?

Re:WTF

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Worse, does he realize that students in 200-person schools now enjoy ten times as much router CPU time as the underprivileged students struggling in 2,000-person schools?

Re:WTF

[bonch]

Fuck you, shill.

Signed,
Jimmy Gianato, West Virginia Homeland Security Chief

Re:WTF

[nedlohs]

That 200 student school better have the same number of classrooms, chairs, and desks as the 2000 student school.

And the same number of teachers. The same quantity of lunch prepared each day. The same number of computers. Can't harm the opportunity of the people at a smaller school after all.

Re:WTF

[ColdWetDog]

Probably read it on Maxim or something.

Then just got a little confused about the subject matter at, er, hand.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony in his statement is that the student in the smaller school with the same size router will have more routing possibilities than a student in a larger school. Thus he is fighting for unequal routing opportunities, but biased towards smaller schools.
 
Yes, I'm kidding around.

Re:WTF

[LordLimecat]

Clearly, you havent seen the packets that come out of these routers. Theyre so crisp, so clean, the ones so sharp, the zeros so full bodied and round....

I used to be a skeptic, but one day I broke down and decided to try the Cisco experience. I hooked my comcast modem's ethernet port up to a Cisco 3900, and that to a Catalyst 6513, and now I never have to experience low quality on youtube simply because someone only uploaded at 320p. Everything is so much cleaner, the sounds more audible, the content more enjoyable, even the slashdot comments have become wittier.

Give it a try, you will be impressed.

Re:WTF

[sampo]

Nothing goes with a Catalyst 6513 quite like http://www.monstercable.com/productdisplay.asp?pin=1727

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigger is better in big government

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

But did you use those "Monster Ethernet" cable? Your regular CAT-5E or CAT-6 doesn't match those "MONSTER ETHERNET" cable quality
and jack.

Re:WTF

[Dracophile]

All connected with Monster Ethernet Cable.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

crap, im still using an old 6509! i better upgrade immediately!

Clever West Virginia

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to do this...
"A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students."

They decided each school needed the same router. Hrm. That makes sense to me. NOT

Spending Problems

[neonv]

This is a problem with asking people to find a purpose for a pile of money rather than having a purpose and asking for funds.

Re:Spending Problems

[jmorris42]

And that was the purpose of Porkulus. To piss away the better part of a Trillion dollars in the belief that just throwing such a huge sack of cash at the economy would somehow fix things. Of course it failed. But does anyone on the left admit that? Sure! Idiots like Paul Krugman insist that it failed because they didn't flush twice as much money down a rathole and that it isn't too late to flush some more.

Of course all too much of it would up taking backroads into the pockets of politically connected/favored people and organizations. And that was the actual goal.

Re:Spending Problems

[ColdWetDog]

This is not much compared with the Homeland Security debacle. Our little town was essentially forced to by trunking radios because that's what 'everybody else' is using. We have all of 6 VHF channels on the island. We don't need trunking. But now everybody carries these dipshit, overweight Motorola monsters that require a $20K (I kid you not) station to program them. Their only major advantage of the new ones is that they're so heavy they can be used for self defense.

We were forced to get a 'Police boat' to keep us safe from der Terrorists. Fine, we have a large harbor system and we're on an island. But the only ones you could get with DHS money (which had to be spent on the boat) were designed for nice urban harbors that didn't have things like sharp volcanic rocks everywhere and that weren't designed for heavy water.

So the boat sits in the stall with it's side bladder half inflated (another rock) while the old beat up aluminum skiff does the actual work.

So, yeah, Standard Operating Procedure.

Re:Spending Problems

[betterunixthanunix]

It is not as though there was no need for money anywhere. Government money comes loaded with problems, though:

1. The people who know where the money needs to be spent are many layers down the management hierarchy and get basically no say in how it actually is spent.
2. There are long lists of restrictions; for example, if a government money is used to pay for a library's connection to the Internet, the library must have a special firewall that blocks "objectionable" websites.
3. Corruption -- it is ever-present in politics, and decisions about what equipment to buy are frequently influenced by less-than-ethical political favors and deals.

Re:Spending Problems

[triffid_98]

Agreed 100%.
This is stupid and wasteful, but Homeland Security grants are obscene. There's almost zero oversight so you end up with tiny hick towns getting armored personnel carriers, bio-weapon gear and grenade launchers because of pretty much the same logic in this article, it's 'free' money


...except we all know it's really not.

Re:Spending Problems

[ColdWetDog]

Bloody hell. Who got an APC? I want one of those.

And a couple of grenade launchers.

We got gypped!

Re:Spending Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

The housing bubble in a nutshell.

Re:Spending Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the problem with budgeting for the year ahead (read that as putting money aside for vague plans or ideas) and then the following year having to spend that money even if you now realize the vague plan or idea was ill conceived or now defunct. Because we all know that departments don't like giving back unspent money because there will be less money available for next years ill conceived ideas. So buy something that we no longer need and keep your budget growing for next year. And the cycle continues...

This is why we have TWO fully populated IBM Blade Centers that have never been turned on and are now being "decommissioned"... and that is just one example of stupid waste where I work...

Re:Spending Problems

[adolf]

Huh, weird.

I program both Astro and APX "Motorola monsters" for our statewide Homeland Security-funded trunking system using my 8-year-old Dell laptop under Windows (worth about $100), some special software (also about $100), and a fancy cable with some active electronics built in ($75).

If there is an area where a "$20k station" is required to do this job, please let me know where it is so that I may immediately relocate to there and begin seriously considering retiring while I'm still young.

(All sarcasm aside: Please note that I said "program," but then so did you. The gear to properly diagnose and service a 2-way radio which is misbehaving (ANY 2-way radio) is indeed awfully bloody goddamn expensive, but that's the nature of specialized test equipment in any field, especially when it comes to the calibre of gear that includes NIST-traceable calibration. Indeed, $20k seems a bit low to outfit a shop to do such work. But none of that is required, or even really very useful, for simple programming.)

How many routers did you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

West Virginia has purchased hundred of enterprise class routers

vs.

worst part is that hundreds of the routers are

Re:How many routers did you say?

[Lorens]

TFA says 1064 routers.

Common Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Many schools I have worked with overkill their network. Putting in Catalyst 6500 switches for a school just to get a Metro Fiber connection in. When they could just buy a SFP that would do the same thing in their existing Catalyst switches. Very gross overkill indead, when we are canceling after school projects, science, books, etc..

Unintended benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if some of those schools have one of those little rooms like at Carrier CO's that divert all traffic to NSA?

Because ...

[PPH]

... TSA/HomelandSecurity/Patriot Act is all about transfering public funds to private contractors.

hundreds of the routers are sitting in their boxes, unused, two years after the purchase.

But they were purchased. Mission accomplished (to borrow a slogan).

Re:Because ...

[rubycodez]

nope, economic stimulus only works when money changes hand again and again so the economy grows. Routers sitting in a box don't do that. Routers installed do a little of that. Routers installed and gainfully used can do a big amount of that, but not by using a $22,000 router to do a $150 router's job.

Re:Because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The money isn't sitting in a box. I'm sure the money is changing hands and growing. It's just that it never gets back around to the taxpayers who still owe for it. Don't worry about a huge lot of money not being used --- there are a select few people making good use of it.

Re:Because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are just following Bush's advice following 911 - carry on shopping (your economy needs you)

Re:Because ...

[magarity]

The money isn't sitting in a box. I'm sure the money is changing hands and growing. It's just that it never gets back around to the taxpayers who still owe for it. Don't worry about a huge lot of money not being used --- there are a select few people making good use of it.

The money might be changing hands downstream but the gp's point is correct - it's only economically positive if both parties get something worthwhile in the transaction in question. An overpowered router plugged in and routing is still a beneficial transaction just inefficient. An overpowered router sitting in its box is just a waste.

Re:Because ...

[rubycodez]

but in that case it would be the same to just hand the money over and forget the router.

Re:Because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but don't forget Keynesians advocate war as economic stimulus. Perhaps they should pull the Office Space scene on each of the new routers for the economic "win".

Don't trust any economic theory that says personal savings are evil/antisocial/detrimental and advocates destruction of economic output (war) as a positive alternative instead.

they got them with mark up and car like add ones

[Joe_Dragon]

The routers alone cost the state $7,800 each, but "add-ons" -- additional equipment that came with the devices -- boosted the price tag by $14,800.

"It's like buying a car," Gianato said. "You get a lot of options with the car."

An online Cisco retailer was selling new 3945 series routers for $5,800 last week. The routers have a list price of $13,000 each.

Cisco was the lower of two bidders for the $24 million router sale. Hebron, Ky.-based Pomeroy bid $24.8 million for the 1,064 Cisco routers.

State officials requested that the devices include a "T1 interface card" that would allow schools, libraries and other sites to use the high-capacity routers with their existing copper-wire T1 broadband connections -- while waiting to hook up to fiber optic cable.

The adapter cards added $1.08 million to the purchase price.

Misunderstood the title

[GameboyRMH]

After reading the title I thought they bought $22k worth of average home routers and put them in schools, and imagined a big truckload of routers. Maybe a decent router that can run DD-WRT/OpenWRT.

Then I read the summary :-(

Someone needs to be flogged.

[pecosdave]

#1 - Juniper - just as good IMHO far cheaper (better in some ways)
#2 - Many router distributions are just as good and FAR FAR cheaper. They could have bought an awesome overkill machine with a pile of multi-port NIC cards and still bought a lot of tech for the school with the money left over.

I know, I'm thinking like a standard FoSS philosopher, but still.

Re:Someone needs to be flogged.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They didn't even get near the level of price-comparison, unfortunately.

Given both vendor's likely flexibility on pricing in the face of large orders(small margins on my goods are better than selling nothing because you bought the other guy's stuff, and the marginal cost of a fancy router is substantially smaller than its sticker price), as well as the portion of the bill that was absorbed by miscellaneous options and config and integration and whatnot(which, given that those were handled by another contractor, not the vendor directly), it isn't immediately obvious that merely buying Cisco was a bad plan, or even that they could have escaped with their checkbooks from an arrangement built on commodity x86 gear.

Buying 5-10k routers for sites that could easily be covered by sub-1k routers, from the same vendor, is indicative of planning so deficient that merely switching vendors won't help you very much...

Re:Someone needs to be flogged.

[HellKnite]

While both of your points can be valid depending on the situation, I think it's stepping around the key point of the article. It doesn't really matter whether you choose a slightly less expensive Juniper system or if you home brew something, if at the end of the day you spec out a $15,000 server to host that router distribution, you're still paying *way* too much for routing services at a site that hosts less than 10 devices.

I've dealt with the exact same challenges that this Gianato says he was trying to avoid by simply buying the same model for everywhere. It's a ludicrous strategy, especially when choosing the 3945 as your standard. Using 1900 series Cisco gear would still be overkill for most of these sites, and would cost 10%.

Finally - it seems to me like the government is paying full list for their gear. Even small businesses get SOME discount from Cisco and their resellers, who the hell actually pays list? We're not even a big shop and our discount is at least 30-40% depending on what we're purchasing.

Pretty sad, really.

Re:Someone needs to be flogged.

[jon3k]

I'd really like to see a feature for feature comparison where Juniper is "far cheaper".

ArsTechnica also did an article on this

[Anonymous Coward]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/a-bizarre-operation-why-west-virginia-stuck-22600-routers-in-tiny-libraries/

Accountability

[Hatta]

The West Virginia Office of Technology warned that the purchase was 'grossly oversized' for the intended uses, but the purchase went through anyway.

Ok, so how do we hold the people who authorized these purchases accountable? Why isn't this considered fraud?

Re:Accountability

[gl4ss]

it's not fraud because it's homeland security.

some evil dude would suggest that perhaps the firmwares on those ciscos should be looked at for eavesdrop hooks....

Re:Accountability

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Surely you can't suggest that listening to nerds should be a legal obligation!

Not the main problem here

[MikeRT]

State and federal spending rules are designed to be penny wise and pound foolish. They'll imprison a contractor who charges 5 hours of lunch breaks to a contract but won't even fire an employee who wastes several millions of dollars in a spending spree so ludicrous that no reasonable person would have charged forward on that. So the Verizon contractor who skips an hour a day but costs the tax payers a few thousand dollars at the most is more likely to get prosecuted than the high ranking government employee who just spent $25m when $2.5m (parts and labor) was likely the true ceiling for legitimate costs.

Re:Not the main problem here

[Kjella]

Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud. Billing extra hours to increase your own paycheck is a pretty clear case of fraud, but unless you can prove that somehow the person who ordered the routers got any personal kickback from it you can't really say the same about those. It is of course possible, but I've also seen cases where my biggest question is who thought it was a good idea to hire that person to sit on a budget. But everything can happen when the stupid hire the really stupid.

Re:Not the main problem here

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of Occupy New Haven... http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2012/04/26/new_haven_says_donors_to_help_restore_green/

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—The city of New Haven says donors have come forward to cover most of the cost of repairing damage to the Green caused by the Occupy New Haven encampment.
The city initially estimated it would cost taxpayers around $25,000 to restore the grass where demonstrators had camped out for six months.
The Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees said Thursday that the donors' contributions will leave taxpayers on the hook for about $4,000.
Crews have begun working to restore the site. Officials say the Upper Green will have to be roped off for about two months to allow new grass to grow.
The protesters were among the last remaining "occupy" encampments in the country when they were evicted by police earlier this month.
© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Re:Not the main problem here

[denobug]

Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud. Billing extra hours to increase your own paycheck is a pretty clear case of fraud, but unless you can prove that somehow the person who ordered the routers got any personal kickback from it you can't really say the same about those. It is of course possible, but I've also seen cases where my biggest question is who thought it was a good idea to hire that person to sit on a budget. But everything can happen when the stupid hire the really stupid.

True... We can't fix stupid... But we can sure fire them (whoever in leadership position anyway). The process is called reprimand and they tend to work very well on the very large errors.

Re:Not the main problem here

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud

Sure, but in terms of the cost to tax payers, incompetence is much worse. Yes, it sounds shocking when we hear that some contractor overbilled the state and essentially stole thousands of tax dollars; yet it should be far more shocking to hear that incompetence resulted in millions of dollars wasted, when that money could have been spent on something that benefits the tax payers, or perhaps not spent at all and paid back to the tax payers, starting with the poorest residents of West Virginia.

Re:Not the main problem here

[Fjandr]

You can't fire stupid in most first-world countries, either.

man

[pak9rabid]

Man...I'm working in the wrong state apparently!

Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

If we could get rid of the waste in government, we could probably lower taxes and not have to cut any programs.

Re:Waste

[sneakyimp]

The problem is that one man's waste is another man's treasure.

Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[cpu6502]

For an extreme example, see the train to the nowhere (desert) in California. That's right. It just stops rather than continuing on to Las Vegas.

And for the Most extreme example, see the ghost cities of China where the government is builiding cities to "stimulate" the economy and the cities are almot completely empty. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E Government stimulus == waste, not stimulus. The free market allocates money better (and when the money gets wasted, it's usually some rich fat cat who wastes the money, not the taxpayers).

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

The free market allocates money better

This is true in some cases but should not be followed as a religion. Many people take this axiomatically and apply it ubiquitously instead of looking at models and data and drawing a conclusion. I hope you don't believe this religiously. It is certainly untrue in the healthcare case. Republicans in particular claim that universal (single-payer) healthcare is like forcing something onto people. They say "just because broccoli is good for you doesn't mean the government should mandate that we all eat broccoli. It should be my free choice whether or not to eat broccoli". To which Paul Krugman's concise response is "When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has."

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you provide a link to the train to nowhere? I searched on Google and DuckDuckGo quite a bit but was unable to find any mention of an existing train line that stops in the middle of the desert.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Microlith]

The free market allocates money better (and when the money gets wasted, it's usually some rich fat cat who wastes the money, not the taxpayers).

Yup, they allocated public money right into their pockets, after having burned billions and held a gun to the nation's head and demanded a bailout.

There is no "Free Market." The corporations you worship so don't want one.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[asylumx]

From an economic perspective, money saved is money wasted -- if it's not changing hands, it's not helping the economy. So, which rich fat cat is helping our economy, the one you say is "wasting" money, or the one who is sitting on his nest egg, not letting it trickle down?

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[geekoid]

To bad all of history shows you are wrong.

I"m sure all those workers, who the paid taxes, didn't think it was waste; nor did the merchants who sold the workers things.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

Most extreme example, see the ghost cities of China where the government is builiding cities to "stimulate" the economy and the cities are almot completely empty. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E Government stimulus == waste, not stimulus. The free market allocates money better (and when the money gets wasted, it's usually some rich fat cat who wastes the money, not the taxpayers).

Um, no. The wages paid to the construction workers, etc. will be spent in the economy, leading to an increase in economic activity. It would be better if the spending itself were on something productive, but all government spending isn't a waste. The U.S. interstate highway system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and NASA are all examples of government spending. The free market allocates money for maximum returns, not maximum well-being. It's all quite fine if the well-being of everyone isn't your concern, but it should be the government's.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

Like most senile conservatards, he got agitated about something on AM radio and misremembered all the details.

He's either referring to California High Speed rail (first segment in the Central Valley) or DesertXpress (connecting Las Vegas and Victorville CA).

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Dutchmaan]

"And for the Most extreme example, see the ghost cities of China where the government is builiding cities to "stimulate" the economy and the cities are almot completely empty." So basically what you're saying is that you shouldn't create demand by filling the supply first?... or is it just when governments do it?

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[JesseMcDonald]

when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate

Actually, that's what happens when the government mandates that insurers ignore pre-existing conditions. In an interference-free insurance market, you can't just put off buying insurance until you get sick. The rational premiums in that case (where the risk is 100%) would be at least as high as the payments on an equivalent loan. At that point you don't need insurance, you need a loan—or charity. In either case, there is no reason to involve insurance providers.

The free market allocates money better

Many people take this axiomatically and apply it ubiquitously instead of looking at models and data and drawing a conclusion.

As well they should: the models discount important factors, such as undisclosed preferences and non-material economic goods, simply because they do not fit into a utilitarian economic calculus. The interpretation of the raw data, in turn, is tainted by the flaws and omissions in the model. Worse, the models attempt to draw objective conclusions on topics which are inherently subjective, such as the relative values of goods between different individuals. Prices are only objective reflections of relative value in the absence of coercion, between the individuals involved in the trade—and always for some point in the past.

All else being equal, individual economic actors are in possession of better information than central planners. Information is always incomplete, of course, but individuals know their own preferences, while the planners can only guess at what they would choose. Individuals also have a stronger incentive to collect the information which is relevant to the decisions which impact them the most. Central planners do not have anywhere near the level of detail to govern an entire economy with the same degree of efficiency as an emergent system of individuals making choices within their own tiny domains, seeking and communicating information according to their own unique interests.

Central planning may result in more efficient production or distribution of some specific goods, for some subjective evaluation of "efficiency". After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. However, there is no reason to expect this to be true for any particular case. Such cases can only be identified in retrospect. The market is just the opposite; its emergent properties lead it a natural convergence on the most efficient allocation of resources, without compromising the liberty of any individual participant.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[JesseMcDonald]

From an economic perspective, money saved is money wasted -- if it's not changing hands, it's not helping the economy.

Wrong. From an economic perspective, money saved is money available for investment.

Consumption is a necessary economic activity. It would not be out of line to say that consumption is the entire reason for economic activity in general. Production for production's sake is pointless, as the whole point of investing in the present is to allow more consumption at lower cost in the future. However, the base state of the economy is bare subsistence, all labor and resources devoted to merely staying alive, at a population level far lower than what we have now. Advancing beyond that state requires an investment in capital—tools which enable more efficient production.

Capital is the factor which amplifies the productivity of labor and raw materials, and allows goods to be produced and consumed at lower cost. A lack of saving, and therefore investment, results in degrading capital, less efficient production, and rising costs. Even a zero saving rate implies falling standards of living, as existing capital wears out and is not repaired or replaced.

The net savings rate at the moment is negative. Encouraging consumption is exactly the wrong response. People need to be putting resources aside so that they can invest them later. Spending on consumption beyond their means is just borrowing against their own future well-being.

So, which rich fat cat is helping our economy, the one you say is "wasting" money, or the one who is sitting on his nest egg, not letting it trickle down?

The second. That "nest egg" isn't cash, it's an investment which corresponds to capital goods, meaning more efficient production. As a result of that "nest egg", a given amount of labor and raw materials produces more goods for direct consumption, which increases the variety and decreases the cost (relative to wages) of the goods available for that laborer to buy.

This can be considered an application of the old saying "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." The first individual in your example is of the former variety, giving people fish (money) in exchange for immediate services. The second individual is making capital investments (teaching them to fish—education is an investment in human capital), which amplifies their ability to provide the goods they need and want.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Grishnakh]

That's a stupid way to look at things. This is government money, which comes from taxpayers. If the money is saved, it can be given back to the taxpayers, who can then spend it on genuinely useful stuff: food, clothes, services, electronic toys, etc., which they'll actually use and which will improve the economy. It's not like the money doesn't get spent. Instead, we have the government taking money from citizens, which they could use for themselves, and instead wasting it on bullshit so some corrupt assholes can get a bigger kickback.

Of course, you could just lower taxes anyway, and print more money to pay for all these wasteful expenditures. That'll give you an economy like Zimbabwe's, where a loaf of bread costs 1 Trillion currency units now and 10 Trillion tomorrow.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Grishnakh]

That'd be great if the government actually spent money on useful things. When was the last time it did? NASA is on a shoestring budget these days, the TVA has built all the dams it can, and the Interstate highway system is pretty much done (and was done long ago). These days, the federal government doesn't spend on anything useful like these things (except for the pittance it gives to NASA), and instead spends money on overseas wars, bailouts for corporations so they could give giant bonuses to their executives, and "stimulus" programs like this one which bought $22k routers to sit in boxes at rural schools.

Your comment would have made sense about 40-50 years ago. Not any more.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Quiet_Desperation]

Takes two to tango. Am I the only person left who sees the problem is the government AND the big corps? All of us out here raging against one machine or the other and at each other's throats plays right into their hands.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Quiet_Desperation]

I was going to replay, but you did it better.

Until the general public can be educated out of seeing a rich person as Scrooge McDuck with a money bin full of coins that sit there locked away forever, we are quite thoroughly doomed.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[makomk]

From an economic perspective, money saved is money available for investment.

Yet it seems that the only person who does actually save money over the long term in order to make it available for investment when he needs it, the way that libertarian economic theory suggests people should do, is Warren Buffet - and libertarians seem to absolutely hate him for it! I've seen some really interesting conspiracy theories about how he's plotting to drive hard-working entreprenurial business owners out of business because, thanks to saving up money and shrewd investments, he could afford to buy up the businesses they'd mismangaged into the ground and operate them as going concerns rather than making all the staff suffer for the previous management's failings.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[JesseMcDonald]

Yet it seems that the only person who does actually save money over the long term in order to make it available for investment when he needs it, the way that libertarian economic theory suggests people should do, is Warren Buffet - and libertarians seem to absolutely hate him for it!

I don't doubt that there are some libertarians with Warren Buffet-based conspiracy theories, but that has nothing to do with any libertarian principles. The overlap is a mere coincidence. I have my own problems with Buffet—such as his counter-intuitive and harmful agitation for higher tax rates, on investments of all things—but he ought to be applauded for his insightful investments, not disparaged for them.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

The method that was used to prevent the situation you described

The method that was used to prevent the situation described was for people to get their own damn insurance and not rely on employee groups.

Back then, everyone who was going to get insurance had it, and we didn't have idiots running around making up bullshit about people getting insurance after they got sick to describe the problem of people losing their employee group coverage once they got sick and being unable to get new coverage with a new group.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[azadrozny]

You are spot on. This is the kind of crap that happens when you are given a "blank check" from someone else. If the money used had been West Virginia's money, or the school district's money you bet that more care would have been taken in how it was spent. Because the Federal Government was paying the bill, the State just blindly said "we'll take 1000 of those."

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't call China an example of high spending, they might build entire cities but they build them on the cheap; they are known for having entire apartment complexes fall over and sinkholes appearing under the pavements.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[asylumx]

I think you have a different definition of "Saving money" than I do. You're talking about a savings of 50% off the retail price, for example. I'm talking about putting all that money into a savings account, where it is not spend at all. Also often called a nest-egg or holding. Sitting under your mattress, not going to pay people for services or products.

Don't call me stupid just because you can't figure out what I'm saying.

Re:Govt stimulus == Waste of money

[Grishnakh]

Well obviously, letting the money sit somewhere doing nothing isn't going to help the economy at all. I'll certainly agree to that.

Putting in a savings account isn't doing nothing, however; it's earning interest, and to earn that interest, being loaned out to people to do other things with. So letting money sit in a savings account really isn't doing nothing (unlike sitting under your mattress).

However, we're talking about the government here, not a private individual or company. The economics are rather different, because the government takes money by force from taxpayers (or, alternatively, it can simply print money if it wants, or borrow it from China by selling bonds, etc.). Money wasted by the government truly has a negative effect on the economy, because it's diverting resources that could instead be used for a positive effect. Either it could be spent on more productive things by the government, or it could be returned to the taxpayers for them to spend on more useful things (like food), or it could not be borrowed from the Chinese (meaning interest won't have to be paid), or it could not be printed (meaning inflation will be avoided).

There is absolutely nothing good about the government wasting money. It has no positive effect on the economy. Yes, your "rich fat cat" spending his money on crap is probably better than him hoarding it, but that's irrelevant. We're not talking about rich fat cats spending their own private money here, we're talking about the government spending taxpayer dollars.

Stimulus for the 1%

[wcrowe]

Meanwhile, I bet there are schools in West Virginia where the kids have to share textbooks, and teachers have to hold bake sales to buy supplies.

Re:Stimulus for the 1%

[I Read Good]

I think you're close, but not quite there. I moved to WV my freshman year of high school and graduated in 2006. As far as I could tell, the supplies were fine. I don't think we were hurting for funding (at least not technology funding). Hell, my school (about 1500 students) had three full dedicated computer-classrooms that would typically only have classes in them 2-3 periods of the day with as few as 5-10 kids in each class. I never shared a book. We always had plenty of supplies for science and art classes. However, I think they might underpay their teachers (more so than other places, it would seem). In my four years, I watched three of the best teachers I knew leave for jobs just across state lines where they could make almost twice as much. I know this is anecdotal, likely contains sampling bias, and is a bit off topic. I thought I would share anyway.

Not surprised at all

[dptalia]

A decade ago I worked a contract for a small school district in Texas, installing server. The servers were several years out of date - purchased with a federal grant for millions of dollars. They then say in a warehouse until the district got YET ANOTHER grant to install it. Maintenance? Not unless they get another grant because no one there had a clue.....

The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[Virtucon]

I find an extreme bias in Network Shops that have been indoctrinated with the CCXX mentality: If it doesn't come from Cisco, it's no good and most of the time they buy too much gear!

Cisco makes great stuff and they do have "small" gear too for this, looks like someone put in specs that were way overkill or that the competitive bidding process was not followed. That's common in government where you really don't have skilled people coming up with the technical specs, which in this case were probably done by somebody at VZ..

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[Daniel_Staal]

The competitive bidding process was followed exactly: Someone in government drew up the specs, and then had several companies bid on it, and they picked the cheapest bid.

Of course, the specs themselves were horrible, but that's not a problem with the bidding process... (At least, not in theory.)

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[sjames]

Unless the specs were targeted. For example, must come standard with an image of a suspension bridge on it.

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[Virtucon]

Well when a vendor says it's overkill and specific models and configurations are specified in a public project, then something is fishy.

When a government needs a truck they say "must be 4 wheel drive, able to carry 500 lbs and get at least 15mpg in the city." Not "I need a Chevy Silverado." If they have compatibility needs they can say "Must be able to integrate with a Verizon MPLS network" not "The router should be a Cisco 3945" That should and apparently did raise flags but nobody listened in the WV procurement office.

Again, I'll bet some clod in the WV IT Department or from VZ heavily influenced or wrote the tech specs for this project.

And unfortunately like every other publicly funded project they paid more for it than you or I could have off the street. Without getting into all of the government accountability rants, this again demonstrates why IT Service Vendors line up in droves to get government contracts because the people who write up the specifications are clueless idiots with big checkbooks.

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Juniper could have had the mailroom boy use a sharpie.

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[sjames]

That would be custom, spec requires standard. Vendor is disqualified!

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[gmhowell]

The competitive bidding process was followed exactly: Someone in government drew up the specs, and then had several companies bid on it, and they picked the cheapest bid.

Of course, the specs themselves were horrible, but that's not a problem with the bidding process... (At least, not in theory.)

That's not how that works. The way it works in government bidding is that someone comes up with a bid. This someone is generally a friend or relative of the purchasing officer. Or a saleschick with awesome boobage. After the bid is developed, the specs are drawn up to match, 100%, the items in the bid. Usually including some obscure bit of whatever that only the saleschick's company can provide.

Who needs 'no bid' contracts when you can rig the system to only effectively allow bidding from one company?

Re:The VZ sales rep is now retired in Aruba

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdote Time! I work for a HFC MSO and we regularly bid on these kinds of contracts. Last year we got a RFQ from a small municpal government in Louisiana. Long story short, they had about 200 users and 4 servers spread over 18 offices in a 22 mile radius from their data center. They wanted MPLS, and they wanted us to manage their 3 provider BGP from the data center. Their needs could easily have been met by 1921s at all sites (and probably lots of other vendors, but one of their specs was that all hardware must have a pictographic representation of a suspension bridge), but they had asinine uptime and failover requirements that essentially dictated tandem ASR9Ks at the data center and a second location of their choosing and 1Ks at the rest of the sites. This included one site that had 4 users and no computers, just IP phones. Total hardware was north of 350,000, even before labor and maintenance, and that did not include a new fiber buildout or bandwidth. We submitted two quotes, one for what they needed (which came in just over 25,000) and one for what they asked for (nearly a million over the life of the contract). They went with a third party to buy the hardware and we're just doing the bandwidth. It's been 6 months or so since the initial install, and these circuits are just now going into production. Four of the satellite offices had so much trouble with the MPLS (which, to be fair to the third party, was designed poorly on the spec sheet but was installed according to the letter of the contract, if not necessarily well) they've bought off the shelf Linksys routers and set up a VPN to get IP phones working and the guys at the data center are having trouble convincing them to go back. It's just a cluster all around. The state dictated uptime and failover requirement that suit big city or high value networks, and applied them to smaller orgs with less critical infrastructure with no regard to need or feasibility, spent WAY more money than was necessary on hardware, and mandated a network way more complex than necessary or supportable by the 3 man IT staff available. As far as I know, there's no pork involved, it's just well meaning managers and unelected officials applying what works in one scenario in another, wholly inappropriate place. /Anecdote

Contact...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can voice your opinion to him here...
Jimmy.j.gianato@wv.gov

CSCO still in the crapper

[stanjo74]

And yet, even with all this over-bloated pork stimulus, Cisco stock is still in the crapper.

Re:CSCO still in the crapper

[sjames]

Clearly some of that pork sat out too long.

Ridiculous Waste

[BStocknd]

Wow, a 3945 router to serve as a T1 endpoint? Whoever spec'd and approved that should be fired, no question! I just ordered a half dozen routers for just this purpose, a 1921 with T1 interface for under $1k each.

Re:Ridiculous Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, they ordered the 3945 to server future needed bandwidth and it will probably prove sufficient for 10+ years. The T1 expansion interface was added on so that older rural schools that only have T1 internet connections can also use the 3945 while waiting for a broadband connection upgrade.

In other words, they (probably over) provisioned for the future.

Somewhere, Robert Byrd is smiling

[betona]

After all, WV has a long history of overkill on pork projects.

Re:Somewhere, Robert Byrd is smiling

[I Read Good]

No, Byrd was good at being on committees and refusing to sign off on anything that he could possibly get built in WV. There is a long list of government facilities that really have NO business being in WV, but they're here. My favorite example is the United States Coast Guard's Operations Systems Center. West Virginia, being land-locked and all, is an obvious choice for a base that supports a sea-faring service. This USCG station is directly adjacent to a massive IRS facility. In Fairmont, WV there is some NASA IV&V stuff as well as some NOAA facilities. Not to mention CJIS (the largest division of the FBI) in Clarksburg. Sugar Grove may be too old to be Byrd's doing, but the rest are relatively recent. I'm sure the list goes on; these are just the one's that I've personally dealt with.

oblig bank analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds an awful lot like the ATM tech who went to prison a yr or so ago for replacing real $ w/counterfeit while all the wall st executives who replaced real $ w/securities they knew couldn't possibly generate the required cash-flow over their life who've not only not been indicted but have gotten to keep all their comp for their "performance"

Modules, maybe?

[CanoeCrasher]

One possibility lies in the "expansion modules" discussed.

A 3945 is, indeed, a potent router capable of handling WAN connections over 100Mb. That's way more than you'll probably find in rural WV, today.

If this was bid to an RFP of some sort, then it gets muddy. Who wrote the RFP? Why did they choose those capabilities?

However, a 3945 Integrated Services Router (Generation 2) also support 4 SRE modules. These routers _could_ have integrated switch modules. No one will ever have to go out there to console into the switch - because it's a card in the router. There could be WAAS or UCSX modules, which provide WAN acceleration and ESXi hypervisor capabilities. There could be VOIP SRST capabilities built in for future (or current) voice redundancy. Again, this seems expensive, but generally shows an improvement in management down the road. One place to manage all the equipment in the library can be a significant improvement.

That router _could_ be replacing a WAN accelerator, a key system, a firewall, a switch, and a small VM server. Or maybe it's gratuitously oversized. The article doesn't include enough information to make that decision.

Lastly, 1000 T-1 cards added $1M to the cost. Well, yeah. That means each card cost $1k.

(I work for Cisco, if that matters)

CC

Most telling quote...

[el borak]

"I'm not an expert on the technical side," [Gianato] said

This from the man "who's leading the state broadband project".

West Virginia. Wild and Wonderful.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[CanoeCrasher]

That's a lot of expansion modules - those could be switches, WAN accelerators, ESX servers... all sorts of things.

There's cost savings in management when you put services in the router instead of separate boxes. Plus, then you don't buy separate boxes, too.

(I work for Cisco, if that matters)

CC

News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

A poorly guarded pile of money was stolen (at least in part by Cisco in this case).

That *never* happens. :)

It's a trap!

[Anonymous Coward]

some evil dude would suggest that perhaps the firmwares on those ciscos should be looked at for eavesdrop hooks....

Damn right. Librarians notoriously refused to co-operate with the PATRIOT act and allow FBI to get details of everyone's borrowing without a warrant, so presumably these routers have been bugged by DHS to make their decision irrelevant. They're going to record everything done by everyone using a public internet terminal at every library.

Return the gear for a full refund, jail the perps

[dsmithhfx]

That's the only way you'll ever put a stop to this kind of thing.

The story is bogus

[brennz]

I have never seen a real college campus served by a Cisco 3945.

I have seen plenty of branch offices and banks with using Cisco 3800 series devices, the 3945 predecessors.

Whether or not the device was overpaid for is a different question - I wouldn't be surprised if they used some 8A competition limiting factors that jacked up prices, or, if it included the actual installation and smartnet maintenance costs.

Re:The story is bogus

[QuantumRiff]

I worked at a large company. EVERY office had two 3800 routers.. (got to have redundancy). Most offices were around 50 people, with two T1 lines. There were actually 5-6 offices that were pretty darn big, and needed them.. (3 offices had a 2.4GB fiber ring, and some other big ones used DS3's) But the guy that was in charge of negotiating the deal was so proud of the fact that he "negotiated Cisco down $4k per router" that he just told upper management how he saved the company $4k per router, times 2 per office. I'm sure he got a nice bonus for saving the company so much money.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Lorens]

State officials requested that the devices include a "T1 interface card" that would allow schools, libraries and other sites to use the high-capacity routers with their existing copper-wire T1 broadband connections -- while waiting to hook up to fiber optic cable.

The adapter cards added $1.08 million to the purchase price.

Instead of, say, keeping the old routers, and buying a Cisco 1800 for less than $1000? There HAS to be a illegal commission somewhere in there... $22 million stupid?

Do smaller routers have the CALEA / DHS features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just saying ...

Why use T1's?

[hawguy]

The article says that the routers were provisioned with T1 cards so they are compatible with the copper T1 lines that the libraries already use for broadband.

Why are they using T1's when DSL could give them faster service for much less cost (unless they are getting some super government T1 discount from the phone company)

I know that a T1 is in theory more reliable (in practice that varies... I've seen DSL lines run for years without a problem while the T1 right next to it has problems every time there's a big rainstorm). In theory a tech is dispatched sooner to fix a T1 line.

Re:Why use T1's?

[sjames]

In practice, for a library with one terminal, 5 9's is a bit excessive. Of course, so is a 22K router.

Re:Why use T1's?

[jon3k]

It might be private IP (MPLS, Frame relay, etc). Lot's of municipalities build their own private WAN and then have a couple of Internet connections for access to the Internet. This allows you to build and deploy lots of services "On Net" securely. It's very common practice, same as mid-large enterprises.

Re:Why use T1's?

[hawguy]

It might be private IP (MPLS, Frame relay, etc). Lot's of municipalities build their own private WAN and then have a couple of Internet connections for access to the Internet. This allows you to build and deploy lots of services "On Net" securely. It's very common practice, same as mid-large enterprises.

Of course, with a $22K router (or even a $200 router), it's possible to build a secure VPN network over the public internet, letting you use cheap DSL lines for connectivity....

Re:Why use T1's?

[jon3k]

Securely, not reliably. No QoS, no SLA, etc.

Re:Why use T1's?

[Lorens]

MPLS is cool. However in an MPLS network, you have 1) P routers (core routers), 2) CPE ("client premise equipment"), and 3) PE routers (that connect the P routers and the CPEs). The CPE doesn't need to be and indeed shouldn't be an MPLS-capable router. In a five-console library a sub-$1000 Cisco 1800 for CPE would be a perfect fit.

Re:Why use T1's?

[jandrese]

This is West Virginia, DSL isn't available to most people because the COs are spread so far apart, especially in the rural areas.

Re:Why use T1's?

[jon3k]

First of all, the customer doesn't implement the PE, LER or LSR. They are blissfully unaware of all things "MPLS", to the customer it's simply IP (and typically eBGP). Second of all, what in the world makes you think I'm advocating for buying a $22k router for a T1? I'm responding to someone who said they should use DSL instead of T1s and I'm explaining some reasons why you would choose a T1 over DSL.

Once again

[geekoid]

Homeland security sticks the fingers into a pie it doesn't understand, screws it up.
Defund Homeland security.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[na1led]

Cisco maybe expensive but they are reliable. We changed our switches and routers with Cisco and have had zero problems since. You get what you pay for.

Targetting purchasers...

[slew]

People who manage school budgets are not unlike the people that manage home budgets: they don't get much credit for saving money, except for the credit they get is for how they spend the money that they have saved. There unfortunatly is a tendency to avoid splurge/waste all that money that was diligently saved. Example: look, I saved enough money to send us on a expensive vacation! Look what I bought with this stimulus money!

Also, schools (like many businesses), are prime targets for product and service slamming attack by unscrupulus vendors. Even in the best of times, purchasing groups for school districts and many businesses aren't really experts at what to buy, or even how to negotiate deals. They often aren't much better than the typical minimally-informed car buyer who goes into a car dealer and expects to buy a car and only does it once every 5-10 years. The car dealer gives them an over-inflated price, lets the purchaser negotiate it down so the potential purchaser can feel good, they buy the product and a few more marginally-valuable goodies that have super-high profit margins as add-ons at the last moment. If the purchaser doesn't play ball, they've wasted all the time and go to the next pre-qualified vendor that does the exact same thing to the purchaser, until eventually either the purchaser gets lucky and finds a honest vendor, or they just get tired and buy something that is sorta what they want/need.

Why does this happen more to businesses and schools than individuals? It probably doesn't, it just seem like that because of reporting. Joe-average (or Jane-average) consumer has this happen all the time to them (esp if they don't care too much about money, or maybe they didn't earn the money, but got it from their spouse), but you don't see it on the news. Many people buy stuff because it's "cool" or they got a free gift bag, money is often not a criteria. However many times, the motivation boils down to you can't show people the money you save/earn/found unless it makes a splash and if you feel the need to show the splash to show your worth (to your boss/spouse/friend), it's easy to fall into this trap and vendors know it and they have a product/price point for every amount of splash you want to make.

Guess im moving to West Virginia........

[who_stole_my_kidneys]

so your saying I can get small schools to buy huge enterprise class equipment, at retail prices, and not install them! Most publicly funded institutions get huge discounts on this stuff, so there is even more profit to be made.

Good news? Anyone? Bueller?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone have any GOOD news?

Re:Good news? Anyone? Bueller?

[Quiet_Desperation]

My Little Pony season 2 is on Netflix streaming now.

As a regional WISP I say

[siberian]

F*ck you broadband stimulus.

That was such a rigged process we went through. We even had the governor sign our petition that was submitted to the fed (promising matching funds and loans) to extend broadband to TRULY rural and unserved (not underserved, UNSERVED) areas and lost out to the big boys who went and did stupid stuff like this.

$22k would buy us an entire base-station that will serve 100+ users.

Grrrr..

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[ColdWetDog]

All certainly true. However, small libraries don't need all of that functionality. They could probably get by with a WRT56. It's only a cost savings if you need the functions in the first place.

And I don't even think that the argument that all of the routers should be the same makes any sense. When you have libraries ranging from one room to a five story building, there isn't going to be a one size fits all.

I'd perhaps go for a single vendor solution, but not a single device.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Reece400]

He sounds like he just doesn't understand how this works, He seems to think a $22,000 router would somehow faster or better than a $500 router even if only 4 people are connected to for basic web browsing. FTA: Gianato said putting the same size router in every school was about "equal opportunity." "We wanted to make sure a student in McDowell County had the same opportunities as a student in Kanawha County or anywhere else," he said. "A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students."

They have bandwidth envy

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be hard living in our shadow

http://www.oar.net/press/releases/2012/2012_050712_100G_expansion.shtml

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco maybe expensive but they are reliable. We changed our switches and routers with Cisco and have had zero problems since. You get what you pay for.

I agree with you. I changed my broken router for a $50 WRT54GL with Tomato years ago, and I haven't had any problems since either. I'm glad I didn't skimp on the cost and buy some $30 crap.

Ender's Game

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you try facing the buggers over a cheap linksys, see how far you get.

I, for one, welcome our new alien-overlord-slayers.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[History's Coming To]

The point is they're getting far more than they need. Imagine we're talking about a library with, say, 15 public terminals and a few office computers. If each computer is just browsing low-bandwidth sites like a webmail service then a really cheap ($50) router could just about handle it. Step up to everybody watching YouTube vids and you might need to spend a few hundred dollars to keep things reliable. The systems they got were suitable for a university or large office building, what they needed was "adequate internet cafe" systems.

Red Washing Machines

[Anonymous Coward]

At least now they have electricity.

They can always put pencils in the little holes.

jr

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[gstrickler]

Cisco - You can buy better, but you can't pay more.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Cisco is the best for routing equipment, there is no denying that. My big problem is which Cisco equipment they chose to buy. 3945s are edge routers and have the price tag to match. They could have easily gone with 1921 or even an ASA 5505 for 10% of the cost and still had the reliability provided by Cisco gear.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

Is WRT56 the successor to the WRT54G, offering 56mbit wifi?

$24M is peanuts

[AkkarAnadyr]

They've also blown $100's of millions on x-ray machines and explosives detectors.

Those are sitting unused in warehouses too, two years later.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

All of them need 10-gig lan switches, as well, and PoE-- even if they have no PoE devices.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

For $22,000 they could have bought 44,000 WRT54gs with DD-WRT on them, flashed them all with the same firmware /config, and if anything went wrong just threw the malfunctioning one away and popped in one of the 39,999 spares.

Theres a point at which "reliable" is no longer enough to justify the pricetag, especially when dealing with a 4-user scenario. And its not like there arent oodles of Cisco products for way less money that can handle T1 and come with the "legendary" cisco name, for instance a 1800 router, or if youre feeling particularly spend happy a 2900.

Coulda saved some money. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . .and bought some counterfeit Cisco gear off of this woman.

Basic Pattern Recognition

[Anonymous Coward]

Not 24 hours ago, a Slashdotr posted a similar article about TSA being investigated by the House Oversight Committee for their overstock of backscatter scanners. The similarity between these cases is the apparent habit of TSA's failure to adhere to a reasonable of justifiable analysis of the system's requirements of budgetary restraint. Purchasing greater quanitities of high cost electronics than can be justified to accomplish the primary mission seems to be the new norm. The responsible personnel then claim that there's a benefit to overspending, and they do so with apparent impunity.

"But Honey! I saved 50% on each of the items I purchased because I bought twice as many as we need in order to get a discount!" In this case Verizon's account rep appears to have known something was wrong and did his best to make the deal look better by delivering more units than the contract called for. One wonders where this ends. Did the telecomm giant place an excessviely large order to components in order to get a discount from their supplier? And what of the companies that manufacture the subcomponents or the resource extraction companies that mine the minerals?

Who knows, if you dig deeply enough, you may be able to trace the chain of overconsumption all the way back to the Chinese who managed to corner the world market on rare earth minerals or the mining concern that shipped their operation from CA to China thereby shifting world supply from the U.S. to China. But let's not stop there... there's an entire industry of people whose enlightened self interest revolves around the analysis of geopolitical strategic interests which stem from the likely future shortages of commodities. If you're a real conspiracy theorist, you'll review the purchasing habits of the military to see if there was a glut of missiles in their inventory before the 1st Gulf War.

Just ask Thomas P. Barnett, author of the Pentagon's New Map.

This stinks of graft

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at a school district that had skills in writing erate proposals, they bought hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment to enrich fat salespeople - it was very incestuous. I walked through cavernous storage rooms with sun and nortel hardware stacked in boxes, all purchased more than a calendar year prior (a violation of erate). It was staggering. I never blew a whistle simply because there were too many good people who would have been hurt ... and this, in a nutshell, is how much corruption goes unchecked. I am not positive that this is what happened in this case, but it strikes me as a similar, nonsensical purchase.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

No it has a phone port for 56k modems

I've seen stuff like this happen before.

[hey!]

Take a look at the bio of the guy who is the proximate cause of this debacle. He's got quite a solid background in public safety, but in 2009 when the money bomb dropped he had no experience whatsoever in procuring and managing technology. So why didn't they hire somebody who knew what he was doing? Because they were required to spend the money right away. You can't hire somebody in government right away. It just doesn't happen. But you *can* hire a contractor or vendor.

I've seen this before. You give a local or state agency with little or no experience with technology a bundle of money to solve some pressing problem like bioterrorism, and you order them to spend it on technology *immediately* or lose it. They don't have time to figure out how to spend the money reasonably because they've got to get the purchase orders cut *right away*. You've basically handed them a golden hot potato.

If you remember the big debate over the fiscal stimulus, the people you'd have expected to vote against it were grumbling, but they voted for it, provided that the money was channeled into "shovel ready" projects. Think about the assumption behind that, which is that the anticipation of income in the near future has no stimulative effect on current hiring or private spending. I actually think that's backward. People are more likely to invest their own money if their is money coming down the pike; if it has to be spent right now they aren't going to hire or invest, they're just going to pass it on.

At the time I thought the "shovel ready" emphasis was a recipe for fraud and abuse, because I'd seen the golden hot potato effect at work in the post 9/11 rush to spend money on homeland security. I saw agencies that were competent at their job and well-intentioned, but chronically underfunded suddenly find themselves with a big pot of money to spend on things they had no experience with. Now how do you think *that* was likely to go? Under the circumstances the only way to get rid of the golden hot potato was to hand it to a contractor who had the experience and administrative capability to absorb a lot of federal money quickly. It's a specialized skill; not every vendor has the accounting infrastructure to suck up hundreds of thousands or millions of federal dollars overnight with all the bogus "controls" attached to it.

I'm convinced the golden hot potato effect is no accident. Somebody always makes a ridiculous profit off these things. The ultimate cause of this problem isn't the guy who's handed the hot potato. It's politicians doing their cronies a favor buy turning a federal grant into something that can't possibly be spent wisely.

Re:I've seen stuff like this happen before.

[stanjo74]

That's the difference between "money in search of a problem" and "a problem in search of money".

$6K Routers, not $22K routers

[gavron]

It's still overkill, but these are not $22K routers. They're $6K routers.

http://tinyurl.com/7ovtywa

Ehud

Re:$6K Routers, not $22K routers

[ChumpusRex2003]

Yes. The routers are $6k each. However, the purchase contract specified $16k of add-ons for each router.

Re:$6K Routers, not $22K routers

[gavron]

Those two fast ethernet ports must have been "mighty" expensive ;)

Configuration:
1 Big Honking Cisco Router -
1 Port to the carrier (TDM or FE)
1 Port to the LAN (FE)
1 Library or rural school grade 24 port switch for the 4 workstations
----------
$22K

LOL right?

E

Re:$6K Routers, not $22K routers

[Anonymous Coward]

They cost way more then 6k, for 6k you get the router and that's it, The real money is spent on smart-net, and licensing. IOS 15.X requires licensing for anything beyond basic routing, I'm sure they maxed it out with Enterprise Security, additional VPN licensing, 2port MFT, and 4hour TAC for 3+ years, additional power supply, more ram and flash. This will easily bump the price beyond 20K.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Best analogy so far.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[colinrichardday]

$22,000/44,000 = $0.50. A WRT54gs with DD-WRT only costs 50 cents?

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

.... where are you seeing WRT54gs for $0.50?

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like having a decimal point in the wrong place isn't limited to West Virginia bureaucrats signing contracts.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything Cisco is just an HP with a blue Cisco logo'd bezel on the front.
Just sayin'...not really sure which is cheaper/has better support all I did was pull the parts. I just found it funny that *conglomerate* buys HP routers one day, then Cisco routers the next day, and they all come from the same warehouse. People here seem to hate HP and love Cisco, they are identical hardware and assembled in the same place.
M5 was a terrible building to work in. I once saw a tester try to plug in a dual PSU machine 1 at a time...Why couldn't they just give me her job :(
I was fired for no reason, so my NDA was nullified with that.
captcha: bolder
yeah I could make bolder statements, but I won't.

Were they actual plans?

[bigtrike]

I have to wonder if any of these cities had real plans for broadband, or if they just cry wolf in order to get access.

Re:Were they actual plans?

[mdielmann]

So what's more broken - having to threaten to put in your own broadband, and then be sued not to in order to get the telco to put in broadband, or having to do that in earnest?

Re:Were they actual plans?

[sir-gold]

In the case of Montecello, they had been working on the plan for years. There had been city hall meetings, and bond meetings, and bond votes, and everything was ready. The city was just about to start actual construction when TDS sued.

What would Keynes say?

[colinrichardday]

From the last section (VI) of Chapter 10 of The General Theory (1964 ed.)

It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly "wasteful" forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict "business" principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions.

and

Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[colinrichardday]

I hope I never need to have the GGP calculate a digoxin dosage!

Or somebody's getting a kickback

[Radical Moderate]

I work in IT for education, believe me, most of us know what a dollar is worth and do our best to stretch them. Somebody's either on the take or a complete moron.

Re:Or somebody's getting a kickback

[cusco]

I rather think that when Mr. Gianato retires from "public service" he's likely to have a nice job with stock options waiting for him at Verizon. That's not legally bribery . . .

Re:Or somebody's getting a kickback

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what area of education you work in, but for every dollar I save there is some bone headed administrator with a pet project that is BS that spends that dollar and an additional dollar. I've stopped caring and warn everyone I see to stop voting for school bonds and donating money to the local education system unless they know its ran correctly. If you want to donate to a school, go to the teachers and ask what they need and buy it for them then donate it to them, you will still get the tax write off but at least then you know that money will be used correctly.

Re:Or somebody's getting a kickback

[ewok85]

It is called "amakudari" (descending from heaven - much like "golden parachute") and destroying Japan too.

Re:A Score of 3? For what, Technical illiteracy?

[Matt_R]

DSL is distance limited, dumbass. 15,000 feet from the CO is theoretically possible, but will suck eggs.

I have a DSL service 20,000 feet from the CO. It syncs at 6 megabit/sec.

Own much Cisco stock?

[catsRus]

Curious minds want to know Mr G.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

For $22,000 they could have bought 44,000 WRT54gs with DD-WRT on them, flashed them all with the same firmware /config, and if anything went wrong just threw the malfunctioning one away and popped in one of the 39,999 spares.

And spent more than $22,000 on the salary of the IT needed to configure all of this.

Re:A Score of 3? For what, Technical illiteracy?

[cusco]

Lucky shit. Because of the way our neighborhood was originally wired I could hit the closest CO from my yard with a potato cannon, but the signal takes four miles to get to us. During those periods when our connection would actually stay up it was only about twice as fast as my 56k modem was. When my work stopped paying for it we shut it off, as it was more frustrating than anything else.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Lumpy]

I have HP and nokia routers that have been working for DECADES. try that with cisco. I have not been able to, as Cisco routers here from 2002-2005 blew caps. that's when we switched away from Cisco and their retarded config system. IOS is crap.

Hp is what we use, we even ripped out the POS Cisco phone system an went nortel.

simple solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sell them.

Did anyone figure this was intentional?

[Vitriol Angst]

It's a Homeland Security flunky -- he's got "stimulus money". The WHOLE point of Homeland Security was a jobs program that produced nothing of value. The POINT of spending $22,000 on a router but not using it is to KEEP stimulus money from doing any good for the people.

I don't care if anyone thinks this is "over the top" or "tin foil hat" -- what better explanation is their for this kind of nonsense? He found a slightly plausible way to spend money -- might as well be a short band microwave scanner for TSA. $1 Million for the product $0 to train anyone how to use it.

What is HS allegedly protecting us from? Our world is no more dangerous than it was 40 years ago -- yet we've got these jerks up in everyone's grill and the NSA or SOMEONE reading every electronic transmission.

It really makes me angry that this guy intercedes and finds a way to take money that could be helping people -- he might as well be burning it. Security theater is just another farce like billion dollar stealth bombers that fly 2 hours a year. It's only real use it to keep everyone in line and to break up any movement before it can do something about the corruption.

Likely 90% of the people calling themselves Al Qaeda work at the FBI -- and everyone on TV preaches Austerity to help our economy. Meanwhile -- someone diverts Stimulus funds to make sure there is no stimulus. This probably happens with the help of loyal errand boys like this HS stooge all over the country --- the only difference is this little toady got caught.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see getting refurbs for $5 a piece. That's 4400 units. Maybe that's what he meant? His argument is still valid though.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

...and none of your 44,000 WRT54Gs could run a T1. Do school administrators know how to administer DD-WRT? (They likely have been trained on IOS already) Does DD-WRT support centralized firmware/config management? Seeing as they probably meet none of the requirements aside from 'push bits' your suggestion is fairly stupid...

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[luther349]

funny part is i guard a old er. they had wifi etc but when they moved to the new building they either gave the old eq away or trashed it. i probably could have set up that school with used but good eq for frigging free. most of it got trashed we had tons.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't pee on PoE. It's widespread, very convenient, and expensive to add after the fact.

So, who got the blow job on this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone sure did.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Cramer]

Like hell it is. Midspan power inserters are dirt cheap, esp. compared to the cost of PoE integrated switches. (I paid $50 each for a pair of PowerDsine 24port units -- .gov surplus; even the new gige capable systems are far less than the insane markup for PoE vs. non-PoE. The PoE "upgrade" for my office took less than an hour.)

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Cramer]

Really? There are T1 modules for ASA's?

Yes, their requirements were wack, and they bought orders of magnatude more than they'll ever need. (and paid though the nose for all of it... $1k T1 modules??? I have a box of WIC-1T's... at best worth $50 each.)

they've built "The Machine"

[Locutus]

and just maybe the State wants to make sure they have full access to snoop on all equally.

And besides, I think they want to create a Beowulf cluster of those. Can you imagine? lol

LoB

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

But the Cisco 1800 i mentioned at the bottom of my (rather short) post could.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

My math teacher was verizon :( I never learned the difference between cents and dollars, apparently.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

PoE is (in my experience) basically only used for VOIP phones, at least on the scale that youd deal with on a decent sized switch. Anything else could be dealt with pretty easily through an injector.

Serious Question, Bonch...

[Frosty Piss]

Oh, I'm sure bonch, that had they spent all that cash-ola on Microsoft licences, you would be quite fine with it. What with you being on the Microsoft payroll and all.

Ever met Ballmer in private? Who's you Microsoft "handler"? What division handles your briefings? The marketing folks? Do they send you self destructing audio file?

How much time a day do you spend astroturfing?

Just wondering...

Re:Serious Question, Bonch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I'm sure bonch, that had they spent all that cash-ola on Microsoft licences, you would be quite fine with it. What with you being on the Microsoft payroll and all.

I can't even remember actually praising Microsoft in any comment in 10 years of Slashdot posts, unless you count mocking people for writing "M$".

Ever met Ballmer in private?

Nope.

Who's you Microsoft "handler"?

Nobody.

What division handles your briefings? The marketing folks?

None. If I was an employee of the most inept marketing department in the industry, I'd shoot myself.

Do they send you self destructing audio file?

A self-destructing audio file? You don't even notice how stupid you sound.

How much time a day do you spend astroturfing?

None.

I guess I'm confused because I thought I was supposed to be an Apple shill, but I guess I'm a Microsoft shill now?

Keep on spergin', little neckbeard.

Mikrotik is a much more cost effective solution

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when you let Cisco doctrinated engineers run networks. How about Mikrotik routers which the rest of the planet us use successfully for 1/20 of the cost. Wait, it doesn't say Cisco so it can't possibly work. Tell that to the millions of people connected to them.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[QuantumRiff]

Heh.. I never hear that cisco is the best from anyone except complete cisco shops. Keep in mind, the ASA 5505 is not a router, its is a firewall.. Trying to route with it is an excersise in frustration. we are replacing our very, very expensive ASA's with a couple of $800 Junipers running in a cluster, with tons of failover redundancy. Costs less than what we pay on our annual maintenance for the ASA's..

Has anyone else noticed that...

[rnturn]

... people working in a "homeland security" role seem to be either the most incompetent or the most corrupt people to ever draw breath? There's the recent report that the Federal DHS spent ludicrous amounts of money on crap that has either doesn't work or hasn't even been deployed and now this waste of money in WV. (And I swear that I've seen other reports of huge wastes of money reported earlier.) We probably won't have to wait long to find that most of the other 49 states have had just as outrageous or worse wastes of taxpayer's money.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

where can you buy a WRT54g for $0.50?

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

eh? Well fuck you too you fat sack of crap.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

we even ripped out the POS Cisco phone system an went nortel.

Yeah, cuz THEY'RE still around...

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[adolf]

PoE is (in my experience) basically only used for door access control card readers and biometrics, and IP cameras, and copper Ethernet extenders, and 802.11 wireless access points, and pro audio gear.

Meanwhile, the only VoIP phones I've ever installed needed a local 5V wall-wart and did not support PoE (would've been nice).

Your mileage plainly differs.

That said: It's easy to segregate PoE devices, because there typically are only so many of them, and it's also ridiculously easy to add PoE into any existing infrastructure -- especially if the only thing using it is a bunch of bandwidth-efficient telephones. Cross-connect cables and human time are cheaper, all day long, than superfluously providing PoE to every port.

Worst Part

[sociocapitalist]

"Perhaps the worst part is that hundreds of the routers are sitting in their boxes, unused, two years after the purchase."

No. The worst part is that 'Homeland Security' is involved at all in such a project.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[sociocapitalist]

List price doesn't mean anything. Cisco discounts heavily to premium resellers like verizon and to large companies who negotiate properly. Discounts of 70% are not unheard of.

It seems to me (and I've been in this industry for a long time) that verizon charged the maximum possible amount for both (oversized and overspecced) products and services and DHS ponied up the money.

It would be interesting to know if this was a closed bid and if not what the other providers would have charged for the deployment.

It would also be interesting to know why DHS is involved at all.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[sociocapitalist]

Not to mention other vendors than Cisco...

Can you say...

[Anonymous Coward]

"kickback"?

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty obvious where the difference in base price and final price comes from. They opted for the Nigel Tufnel expansion modules. You get a knob that throttles packet flow up to eleven, making these routers one faster than the standard kit.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the budget model, without hardware accelerated typographic error checking.

Re:Futureproofing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems from the above referenced maps that WV is planning to make a couple of high-speed fibre loops through the state to form a high-speed internet backbone that links back to the main links for the US. Assuming that that project EVER gets started or finished, the link speeds that will be available to these small libraries and schools will be MUCH faster than what they have now, perhaps 100Mbps MAN links or higher. When you start pushing the spec for "maximum forwarded packet throughput" to high enough levels to support this projected future backbone/MAN plan that the state has, you start ruling out the lower end equipment that is orders of magnitude cheaper than this stuff. Also, some of the lower end Cisco gear doesn't support those higher speed interface cards for those higher speed links.

The next thing to consider is equipment reliability. WV doesn't have much in the way of people that can go out to these rural places and replace this gear when it breaks. This was paid for with an equipment grant, not an ongoing budget item. This stuff has to be reliable since it's going to be a long time before anyone from the state will be able to get to it to fix it when it breaks. Again, raising those reliability requirements takes you up to more expensive equipment. Going along with that idea, they probably also went pie in the sky for all the things they'd like to do with it. Traffic prioritisation, link compression, secure VLANS, all kinds of things. As those requirements increase, the base IOS on the devices gets to be an issue that needs to be upgraded with a purchased IOS upgrade. More cost.

Finally, if they made the bone headed decision that they were going to support only one type of device across the entire network because "we have limited personnel, therefore we can't learn the marginally different things we need to to support multiple devices" then they forced themselves to have to make every device as capable as the location that required the most capabilities. This doesn't make sense to you or me under normal circumstances, but in the mind of the state budget commissioner, it makes perfect sense. A one time grant of money for a project is a single use pot of money, not an ongoing money stream. As a result, acquisition managers are directed to spend the entire pot of money ASAP, both to get maximum use out of it and because, if they don't, another greedier department will find a way to take it for their own uses. Most government departments do not keep a reserve of money stored up some place precisely because if they do, the higher ups will discover it, decide to use it for something else, and the department won't have it when they need it anyway. So, they stock up on consumables and spares for their existing equipment and also buy all of the materials needed for a project up front and store it, at taxpayer expense, because if they don't, they definitely won't have the money to buy the stuff when the use whatever small supply they start the project with. If you think it's bad at the city and state level, you should try some national level federal IT projects. The warehouses are massive, as are the money outlays.

Getting back to the one-time vs. continuing budget problem, If a manager has the budget to buy near perfect equipment that is extremely unlikely to fail and find a way to train their existing staff to support that piece of equipment instead of spending a quarter as much to buy cheaper equipment that fails maybe 4 times as often, but requires them to add just one more warm body to their staff for an amount that would still be much less than the life cycle cost of the more expensive equipment, they'll get the more expensive equipment every day of the week and on weekends! It's easy to get money once, it's near impossible to be guaranteed a continual money stream for another head, then, once a round of budget cuts hits, and that head is lost, you're left with a bunch of failed equipment in the field and not enough people to keep up with fixing/replacing them. So, yes,

So resell the routers?

[jandrese]

This was clearly a case a gross incompetence/corruption, but it's hardly a disaster. The fix seems easy enough, pull the hilariously overspecced routers out of the libraries/schools, sell them off for a decent fraction of their original price, and buy appropriate routers to replace them, cheap ones. Use the leftover money to buy books for the libraries or school supplies or something.

Re:A Score of 3? For what, Technical illiteracy?

[ewok85]

It is physically impossible for you to have a 6mbit Dsl connection and be 6km from the DSLAM. If there was one almost directly between you and your exchange that sync speed would make sense.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[ewok85]

People tend to forget that an ASA is about 10% hardware, 90% licensing fees when you look at the price. I have a 5505 and love it, but I don't delude myself as to what it is and isn't.

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[CanoeCrasher]

Not if you want to support it. A small library could easily need
-an onsite Domain Controller (for AD failover)
-Switchports for those 8 computers and 10 PoE phones and 5 APs to provide wireless coverage
-WAN acceleration. 2 or 3 Citrix machines? Maybe the library app uses SQL to communicate with a server somewhere else?

There you go. A UCSX module, a WAAS module, and an Etherswitch module. All on one support contract, too. I'm not saying they need those services, but if enough sites use them, it makes sense to deploy that capability everywhere. That small rural library may very well have wireless, VDI, and other capabilities in the next few years.

That is all well within reason. And I would disagree that a consumer device would work. No IT department in their right mind would want to support 1000 consumer boxes. They fail too often, don't support advanced services (see above), and the wireless coverage from a single omnidirectional antenna can barely cover a 1000 sq ft house, much less a municipal library of who-knows-how-big. These 1000 sites are being managed centrally. RBAC with AD integration and a real LMS would be crucial to handle config changes, OS upgrades, etc.

(I work for Cisco)

CR

Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one

[LordLimecat]

I'd agree with that, and obviously we deal with different cases.

As for the phones, generally (at least with cisco phones) you get a switch with as many ports as you have workstations, wire it with PoE, and set up VLANs. The cisco phone has 2 ethernet jacks, one for receiving the PoE connection and one for passing bandwidth off to the workstation. It tags phone traffic on one VLAN, and workstation traffic on another (it has a built in switch).

Hence my comment about scale-- you start getting to a large organization with cisco phones, you're going to need as many PoE ports as you have workstation / phone cubicles, while biometrics, WAPs, security devices, etc may only take up a fraction of that many PoE ports.

Re:A Score of 3? For what, Technical illiteracy?

[HereIAmJH]

Note that he didn't say he was 20,000 feet from a DSLAM, he is 20,000 feet from a CO. It's quite common for Telcos to run fiber to a neighborhood and then install a DSLAM. In my old neighborhood they ran fiber to the neighborhoods in the early 90s because they were running out of copper pairs. Back when modems and fax machines were booming. To upgrade to DSL they just upgraded the cabinets/huts with DSLAMs.

OTOH, just because you are close enough doesn't mean they can provide DSL. In the mid 90's I lived in an apartment complex that had a phone cabinet on the premises. At that time I couldn't get DSL because, although I was within the length limit to the CO, they ran fiber to the complex and then copper to the apartments. Bell didn't feel that the complex would support a DSLAM, so we all went with Roadrunner.

Keynesian economics

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why keynesian economics is bullshit. Multiplier effect = bullshit. If this money had not been collected as taxes and wasted, it would certainly have had more benefit to the economy. Keynesian economics assumes that government spending is efficient, which it never is. People should be fscking outraged at crap like this.

Not news, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

This is S.O.P. in the Chicago Public Schools system. They receive E-Rate funding, which comes from a tax on telecoms bills, and regularly spend tens of millions on radically over-specified network gear. I've seen 7200-series routers in elementary schools with fewer than thirty workstations and where the kids are exposed to computers for less than an hour a week. Multiple full-sized blade switches in high schools is also common, even in underfunded blighted-area schools where the students again don't touch an actual computer except to write up a paper two or three times a semester. All Cisco, of course.

I worked for a consulting company in Chicago doing network upgrades for charter schools that were also E-Rate funded. With no exaggeration at all, the average charter high school had equivalent networking gear to a $5-billion bank we also did work for. The best part: 90% of what the full-PoE, gigabit to the desktop, 10-gigabit-backbone network delivered was YouTube videos, Pandora streaming, and Facebook. It does, at least, prep kids for the real world...