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

arstechnica.com

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

#91

Post by cdavid »

vidarh wrote: post #19
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…

You get similar stuff at private companies too, though few private companies are large enough for corruption like that to be able to reach the same scale without getting too big to go unnoticed by auditors for long enough. The number of times I've had potential supplier hint at extra perks or "return favours" is fairly high, and I've not even been in positions of very substantial purchasing power. It's often not even…

Waste in terms of inflated costs is more likely a function of size more than public/private dimension. 20k $ is literally not worth lowering down to get the money in some industries I have witnessed. I have yet seen obvious examples of corruption, and incompetence + incentive is the prevalent explanation: the bigger a project is, the better it is for the people at the top of it obviously, and enough bureaucracy to make it a local optimum.

One typical example I had is not receiving a replacement laptop when working for a bank because replacement hw is too expensive, so I could not work for essentially one month. My consulting rate would have paid for a top of the line laptop in 2 days. But those are of course two different cost centers, so it will never surface.

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

#92

Post by masklinn »

cynwoody wrote: post #79
_delirium wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European labor is pervasively unionized, though, and typically well-paid on construction projects, but the total cost comes in not just slightly cheaper, but at small fractions of the price. Other things involved: there are fewer overlapping transit and government agencies involved in European projects, approvals are faster, contractor billing/profits seem to be more carefully scrutinized, and there is less scope for…

Interesting. According to the Wikipedia[1], the 1318 km Chinese Jinghu High Speed Railway (350 km/h) came in at about $27m/km. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

HSR is much cheaper than metro: you don't have to dig and you don't have to deal with all the shit which is already in the ground under the city, or with the structural risks of the dig.

The french LGV Est, also rated for 350km/h, cost ~€4b (up from an original 3.125m estimate, excluding trains) for 300km[0], or ~€13m/km -> $~17m/km. Including all costs (trains &al) according to the 2007 SNCF report the line cost €5.5b, €18m/km, ~$24m/km.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Est

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

#93

Post by InclinedPlane »

jacques_chester wrote: post #57
vidarh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get similar stuff at private companies too, though few private companies are large enough for corruption like that to be able to reach the same scale without getting too big to go unnoticed by auditors for long enough. The number of times I've had potential supplier hint at extra perks or "return favours" is fairly high, and I've not even been in positions of very substantial purchasing power. It's often not even…

One main difference is that public companies are required by law to have independent auditors. Government departments are not. In Australia independent audits rely on the Australian National Audit Office, which is profoundly and deliberately underfunded because of its annoying habit of discovering embarrassing incompetence and wastefulness.

That's not actually as important as the key main difference.

Governments spend YOUR money, companies spend their own money.

On top of that, companies are subject to competition and, as cynwoody pointed out, they can go out of business. This means that the incentives for reducing fraud are greater in private business and companies that have high levels of fraud that are easily reigned in by obvious solutions will be at a huge competitive disadvantage and more likely to simply go away.

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

#94

Post by robryan »

robryan wrote: post #90
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cisco may not have anything to do with it. It may be down to a salesman in the middle who is on commission. I once saw CCTV cameras deployed with Jena lenses, I guess for similar reasons. The auditors (if there were any) weren't knowledgeable enough to know better. edit: After further reading, Cisco did in fact shamelessly participate in this gigantic boondoggle.

Is this really ciscos fault though? They weren't being paid to tell the government what they needed in these schools.

Sorry, I was confused as to the vendor in this case, sounds like Cisco was at fault.

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

#97

Post by MattBearman »

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…

I've seen examples of this all over the UK as well, when ever it's a Government tender the quotes were always much higher than they need to be, and they always HAVE to have the most expensive, 'enterprise' equipment, whether they need it or not.

I've never understood it myself. Governments are funded by tax money, and the people involved in these companies that love overcharging the Government pay taxes. Congratulations on ripping yourself off.

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

#98

Post by paganel »

joenathan wrote: post #4
chayesfss wrote: post #2

a company like cisco or microsoft trying to rip off state/local governments? color me not shocked.

What does Microsoft have to do with this?

> What does Microsoft have to do with this?

I don't have a source handy, but around 2004-2005 Steve Ballmmer came in a short visit to my country (somewhere in Eastern Europe), he had a even shorter meeting with the Prime Minister of that time and sure enough not 6 months later a Government programme was launched and all the schools and public libraries in my country had to be equipped with Windows machines. This was around the time when people thought that tools like Open Office actually had a chance of toppling the MS Office suite.

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

#99

Post by jeffdavis »

I was surprised how much blame this article lays at the feet of Cisco. What did they do except sell the customer what they wanted? Sure, they might have been more noble if they put on the breaks in the name of the taxpayers, but that could hardly be expected.

It takes a lot of nerve for someone who just wasted my money (federal dollars) to try to blame it on the other party for fulfilling the order.

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

#100

Post by stdbrouw »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #89

What's worse than overpaying millions for a few routers? Overpaying billions. At the federal level, specifically to prevent such things from occurring, there's this huge byzantine procurement process. A process that is literally worth tens of billions of dollars to game. So if you have product foo and want to see a zillion copies of it to the feds instead of some freeware or cheaper solution? 1) Convince somebody on…

The trouble is that you actually do need some of this flexibility in the procurement process. If your department needs Photoshop, you don't want some goofy non-technical auditor telling you that he googled around and thinks GIMP will do just fine. Or you want one particular contractor because just last year they did an amazing job on something that was pretty much exactly what you need.
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