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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.
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.
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"
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.
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."
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.
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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.
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.