Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

We were doing similar work for private school at the same time, and the process for the public and private school could not be more different.

For eg. in the tender process, which I was part of, for private school we would use cheaper Taiwanese routers. For the public schools it 'had to be Cisco'. The only time we ever used Cisco, outside of large enterprise clients with 1000+ seats, was with public school tenders. The private school would get a $500 white-label router, the public school s would get a $6-15k Cisco router with additional VPN module costs.

We would charge a higher consultant rate on the Cisco jobs, and would bill 3 days instead of 1. We won the contract because we were 50% cheaper than the other tenders who all wanted to install 3 and 5-series routers. How we got to the point of being able to even tender is another story that involves somebody in our organization sleeping with somebody at the government organization. The other tenderers were accustomed to dividing the work up amongst themselves at inflated prices, they didn't even know who we were and we received a lot of abuse for breaking up their little scheme.

(Edit: a further idea of how this worked, the 3 people in the gov office responsible for tenders all had very nice cars and holiday homes while the rest of the office was working away on below-average wages. You could see what was going on just by looking at the car park)

So a dozen of us roll out hundreds of these routers in public schools and after a month we find that we rolled out the wrong version of IOS, one that was vulnerable to a simple security attack. Instead of forcing us to upgrade all the routers remotely, or out of our own pocket, we instead won another few-million-dollars worth of work to send a person out and apply the upgrade to each router (which took 5 minutes, we charged a full day plus travel).

The routers weren't even being used properly - the topography was net connection -> cisco router -> internal server -> switches. The internal server would do all the DHCP and everything else. These expensive routers were being used as bridges, although they were pitched as having 'forward compatibility' incase the school wanted to implement features such as user accounts (they did, although again they used a custom server, not the router).

When these projects are audited there is nobody who is technically competent enough to make an argument against who would be on the side of ditching or shrinking the projects. Some of the smarter teachers knew what was going on but didn't mind since they got access to fancy equipment (we would create user accounts for them).

My first, and not my last, experience with government bureaucracy and budgets. I would estimate that the private schools got more out of us at a tenth of the cost. Since then I had an even worse experience with the government health department, where 6-figure invoices were written and paid for goods that didn't exist (that department has since been broken up and the subject of a large corruption enquire). No surprise that I became very anti-government size and spending.

Edit: to add, we were so 'disruptive' to the backdoor deals that we were uninvited from conferences, kicked off panels, not invited to the mixer events where gov buyers met providers, a couple of years later we lost our accreditation[0] temporarily until we appealed to the Government Minister. On site we would be locked out of network cabinets, not given IP information for the net connections, etc. Our jobs were made difficult by competitors and others because of our pricing and methods. They couldn't figure out how they didn't get rid of us, because they didn't know that one of our guys had a solid relationship with somebody at the government (that person wanted to clean things up). Usually we wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near these projects and if we did win one we wouldn't be allowed back in for not playing with the system.

[0] 'accreditation' for government tenders needs to die, it is a formal method used to keep honest operators out of what is essentially a cartel. The Australian government is getting better in this regard[1], they now have an open tender website but I believe it still requires some form of accreditation that has a person in a department standing between application and approval.

[1] although not too much better. NBN Co., a government owned company that is building a $40 billion nation-wide fibre network recently suspended tender process because every single bid came in over the expected price:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/high-price...