Cisco Pricing Undercut By $100M In Big Cal State University Network Project

alphadogg writes "The $100 million price differential between the Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco proposals to refresh California State University's 23-campus network revealed earlier this week was based on an identical number of switches and routers in various configurations. CSU allowed Network World to review spreadsheets calculating the eight-year total cost of ownership of each of the five bidders for the project. 'Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet,' said CSU's director of cyberinfrastructure. 'Alcatel-Lucent won the project with a bid of $22 million. Cisco was the high bidder with a cost just under $123 million. Not only was Cisco's bid more than five-and-a-half times that of Alcatel-Lucent's, it was three times that of the next highest bidder: HP, at $41 million.'"

Comments

CISCO

[hackus]

My full take on CISCO came to a realization I think back in 2000-2004 as I watched the company grow sales with the Chinese.

This treasonous company used every trick in the book to sell China the gear required to hunt down and kill anyone on the growing Chinese domestic internet who had anything to say against the Chinese PRC state institutions. I wondered how could a company reason bypassing all of the controls the state department had put on selling high tech items outside the country, in the sorts of shady deals and the sheer effort required to sell to China without getting caught.

In actuality they were getting caught because people like me who knew what CISCO was doing and tracking their little shady deals through the foreign press. Thanks to the many well known political contacts the board of CISCO had with the Clinton administration and then with the Bush administration I doubt they could have got away with most of the multi hundred million dollar deals over the years unless they were cleared by executive order to do so.

I think this might have been a CIA interdiction in China as just recently lots of "anomalous" behaviour in various sorts of gear over the years caused China to switch to a domestic supplier now, Unicom.

Too make a long story short, don't buy CISCO products because if they are not good enough for a bunch of communists who are obsessed with total information awareness, they sure and the hell are not good enough if you have any value of liberty or freedom.

Besides, any network sys admin worth his salt builds his high capacity network with source code. That means firewalls, routers, which means bgp, quagga, openvpn, ssh.

Besides, you can always tell a guy who knows networking when he starts talking about source tree patches to his IPv6 tree vs "Oh, I don't know how IPv6 actually works, I just wait for a firmware BLOB from CISCO."

If you got people like that on your staff, fire them. They are a security risk.

-Hackus