Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 188 posts

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

#21

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

juiceandjuice wrote: post #10
nikcub wrote: post #8

I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. 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 differen…

It sounds like your company ripped off the public schools, and that's why you are anti-government?

The fact that the government is not competent to spend taxpayers' money wisely seems like a good reason to be anti-government. After hearing enough anecdotal evidence on this topic (which very few people have both the capability and desire to thoroughly investigate in order to properly quantify it, thus the reliance on anecdotal evidence), it starts to appear as if such incompetence is an integral feature of all governments once they reach a certain size.

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

#22

Post by ryguytilidie »

nikcub wrote: post #8

I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. 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 differen…

How are people not being arrested for this daily?

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

#23

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

redshirtrob wrote: post #11

I'd like to know how much of that $5 million savings would have been burned up in the capacity studies. My guess is a lot. Given the choice between a fixed cost and an unbounded cost (being the capacity study referenced throughout the article) I'm not surprised they went with the fixed cost. I'm not saying WV didn't get swindled, but I can sure see how this might have happened: WV Rep: Do we really need these $20k ro…

Actually, the real crime is that they don't sue Cisco to be allowed to exchange the original routers for new ones with appropriate capacity along with a refund in the price difference, with Cisco eating the depreciation and the legal fees.

The grant implementers should also be fired for cause, to wit, incompetence).

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

#24

Post by WestCoastJustin »

Probably going against the grain here, but what about the operations staff who are charged with supporting these 1,164 routers? What about warranties and parts replacements? There is a price for standardizing on a piece of hardware at such a large scale. When you standardize, sure there is going to be hardware overkill in some places, but in the big picture this is just a price of doing business at this scale. What is the price of service calls out to this location when the hardware is down? You have a tool-chain that supports this hardware, you have experts supporting the network (security, patching, etc), and you have contracts in place to make sure it is operational.

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

#25

Post by jessaustin »

[deleted] wrote: post #18
jessaustin wrote: post #13

Gosh, it seems like state bureaucrats can't figure out how best to spend money, and don't care to hire anyone who can. How might one's political preferences change in response to this shocking revelation?

[deleted]

I agree! I strongly suspect that if I lived in Denmark I would support the Danish system: clearly it's working well for them! When I lived in e.g. Singapore and Japan I witnessed those (different) systems working better than ours in many ways, to their credit. The few relative drawbacks I noticed I attribute to the different preferences of the populations (i.e. they aren't really drawbacks in the citizens' estimations). Just as clearly, our system of public officials and lobbyists does not work very well. Most Americans would claim to prefer that there be less wasted money. We just can't get there from here.

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

#26

Post by muboo »

juiceandjuice wrote: post #10
nikcub wrote: post #8

I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. 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 differen…

It sounds like your company ripped off the public schools, and that's why you are anti-government?

If you don't like this kind of behaviour you are doing yourself a disservice by describing it in as simple a manner as you have. Having had similar experience it is surprising that they were allowed to tender that offer at all.

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

#28

Post by vidarh »

redshirtrob wrote: post #11

I'd like to know how much of that $5 million savings would have been burned up in the capacity studies. My guess is a lot. Given the choice between a fixed cost and an unbounded cost (being the capacity study referenced throughout the article) I'm not surprised they went with the fixed cost. I'm not saying WV didn't get swindled, but I can sure see how this might have happened: WV Rep: Do we really need these $20k ro…

Here's a capacity study for you:

E-mail all the IT managers, and ask them:

- How many users do you have? - What is the total size of the community you serve? - Do you need new equipment?

That would have quickly revealed that many of them had so few users that these routers were total overkill, and had so few potential users that even 100% simultaneous usage in some cases would not max out the capacity, and that some of them did not have a need for new equipment.

I agree with you that multiple bidders would be essential. But a tiny little bit of due diligence and investigation on the behalf of WV would have gone a long way.

That said, sometimes this is what backfires too: I've seen a government contract recently where a lot of extra work was carried out to meet the requirements of a "security consultant" that refused to sign off on a system because of "issues" that were clearly generated only to ensure that he could pad his list of "problems" he identified to help justify his fees.

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

#29

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

iamjason89 wrote: post #3

"The auditor began digging, speaking to many people in West Virginia state government who had been involved with the project. The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use…

It is if you are in a situation in which the building power source is much, much more likely to fail than the power supply is, which is definitely the case in a rural school or library. You have to get to a pretty high level of sophistication (i.e. backup generators with automatic failover) before a redundant power supply has any value.
Post reply on HN