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

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

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."

17 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. How the money could better have been spent by John.Banister · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:How the money could better have been spent by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

      this map

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

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    2. Re:How the money could better have been spent by jythie · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:How the money could better have been spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.)

    4. Re:How the money could better have been spent by uigrad_2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Free unix account: freeshell.org
    5. Re:How the money could better have been spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:How the money could better have been spent by Wolfraider · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:How the money could better have been spent by sir-gold · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. WTF by bonch · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:WTF by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

    2. Re:WTF by bonch · · Score: 5, Funny

      Fuck you, shill.

      Signed,
      Jimmy Gianato, West Virginia Homeland Security Chief

    3. Re:WTF by LordLimecat · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  3. Spending Problems by neonv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Because ... by PPH · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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).

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  5. Re:they got them with mark up and car like add one by Reece400 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  6. Re:That hurts my stomach a little... by thomasw_lrd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  7. Re:Somewhere, Robert Byrd is smiling by I+Read+Good · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.