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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."
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.
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?
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.
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).
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Man...I'm working in the wrong state apparently!
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.....
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
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..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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."
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.
They come with a set of Monster Cables...
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.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
All of them need 10-gig lan switches, as well, and PoE-- even if they have no PoE devices.
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.
21st Century Renaissance Man
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.
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.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes. The routers are $6k each. However, the purchase contract specified $16k of add-ons for each router.
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.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
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.
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.
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.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.