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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 co

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 routers for all our locations? Cisco: We really couldn't say what your exact needs are without a proper study. WV Rep: What will that cost? Cisco: It's really hard to say. We'll have to visit all of your locations and speak with the IT Manager there. We'll have to measure average and peak load. Of course, we'll want to plan for future growth so we're not at this same point in two years... The real crime is that they didn't open the RFP to multiple bidders. A little bit of competition can go a long way.

bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
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).
vidarh 14y ago
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.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Wouldn't the central procurement already know the max capacity of the lines (DSL, fibre, whatever) that had been installed, already know what routers/switches were in use and already know the populations being served? That's pretty basic audit information that I'd expect could be pulled up from a central database lickity-split. Eyeballing those figures should be all you'd need - but yes if there was no central record of past procurements an email survey (or better yet online using a survey system) would apparently be pretty quick.
- jcromartie 14y ago
  I doubt the one-room library open three days a week has an IT manager. But yes, obviously they know where the equipment needs to be so somebody must be able to make an educated guess.
Nelson69 14y ago
Capacity study? Hahaha Like they're going to go to the schools and someone there will "know" how much internet they need. They can't even go to the schools and get a good estimate of how many students they expect to be attending in 10 years, almost all the schools in the US are reactive to that sort of thing, they build new ones when the old ones are either so broken down that they can't fix them or they are over capacity. If you go to the schools you get one of two things: 1) a tiny internet straw that 2000 kids share and it's useless or 2) an OC48 to a tier one peer that 163 kids and teachers use for email. There is something more fundamental, there were probably schools that had nothing close to reasonable internet access. (Likely a lot of them were in places where they can't get great internet at home either.) The masses were fed up with it, especially as they thought their kids were being left behind so they beat on their representatives and they just got a blob of cash to fix it, costs be damned. You think it was going to make the parents happy when they announce that it's going to take 7 years to get DSL to their child's school? It's a monster of our own creation. No idea how you solve it... the people that doll out the money have no idea how to do the work or how to estimate if an estimate is good or not; they're just too far away it and the public's memory is too short term. They probably did open an RFP to multiple bidders.. That's just game theory though, you think the bidders want to leave money on the table? Every where I've seen government bids produced, they increase the costs.

bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago

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).

vidarh 14y ago

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.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
Wouldn't the central procurement already know the max capacity of the lines (DSL, fibre, whatever) that had been installed, already know what routers/switches were in use and already know the populations being served? That's pretty basic audit information that I'd expect could be pulled up from a central database lickity-split. Eyeballing those figures should be all you'd need - but yes if there was no central record of past procurements an email survey (or better yet online using a survey system) would apparently be pretty quick.
jcromartie 14y ago
I doubt the one-room library open three days a week has an IT manager. But yes, obviously they know where the equipment needs to be so somebody must be able to make an educated guess.

Nelson69 14y ago

Capacity study? Hahaha Like they're going to go to the schools and someone there will "know" how much internet they need. They can't even go to the schools and get a good estimate of how many students they expect to be attending in 10 years, almost all the schools in the US are reactive to that sort of thing, they build new ones when the old ones are either so broken down that they can't fix them or they are over capacity. If you go to the schools you get one of two things: 1) a tiny internet straw that 2000 kids share and it's useless or 2) an OC48 to a tier one peer that 163 kids and teachers use for email. There is something more fundamental, there were probably schools that had nothing close to reasonable internet access. (Likely a lot of them were in places where they can't get great internet at home either.) The masses were fed up with it, especially as they thought their kids were being left behind so they beat on their representatives and they just got a blob of cash to fix it, costs be damned. You think it was going to make the parents happy when they announce that it's going to take 7 years to get DSL to their child's school? It's a monster of our own creation. No idea how you solve it... the people that doll out the money have no idea how to do the work or how to estimate if an estimate is good or not; they're just too far away it and the public's memory is too short term. They probably did open an RFP to multiple bidders.. That's just game theory though, you think the bidders want to leave money on the table? Every where I've seen government bids produced, they increase the costs.