News W. Virginia won’t release “embarrassing” report on $126M broadband spend

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West Virginia's Secretary of Commerce has refused to release the results of a taxpayer-funded report on the state's use of $126.3 million of federal stimulus funds for broadband investments. The existence of the report was revealed after a freedom-of-information request by the Charleston Gazette.

"The documents may be embarrassing to some people. Embarrassing because it was someone's opinion," West Virginia Secretary of Commerce Keith Burdette told the Gazette. "It was a specific document, citing specific companies, and making very specific suggestions to me."

Burdette argued that as an "internal memorandum," the document wasn't subject to the state's open records laws.

The state has been using stimulus money to subsidize the construction of fiber optic infrastructure around the state. The project includes stringing fiber to 630 new sites and installing 1100 new routers. "A recent West Virginia Legislative Audit report found that the state wasted at least $7.9 million—and up to $15 million—on the $24 million router purchase," the Gazette reports. "Auditors also are examining the use of the stimulus funds to build a $40 million fiber network."

Among the expenditures was a $22,600 router installed in a tiny public library.

arstechnica.com

W. Virginia won’t release “embarrassing” report on $126M broadband spend

Stimulus funds included $22,000 router costing more than building it’s inside.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
 
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"Govt and the Telecoms" Always after your best interests..... Right?
 
holy crap - what does a router that costs $22k do? I could build 10 PFsense servers and configure them in a nice HA cluster for half that amount
 
Slapshot136 said:
holy crap - what does a router that costs $22k do? I could build 10 PFsense servers and configure them in a nice HA cluster for half that amount
Click to expand...
When its a huge library which is supplying hundreds of customers, and also the staff, i can very well imagine the router would be expensive. The library might also have an only service which is run by the same router.
 
Accname said:
When its a huge library which is supplying hundreds of customers, and also the staff, i can very well imagine the router would be expensive. The library might also have an only service which is run by the same router.
Click to expand...

I still can't even fathom what kind of performance numbers that router would have vs a cluster of regular servers
 
Slapshot136 said:
I still can't even fathom what kind of performance numbers that router would have vs a cluster of regular servers
Click to expand...
Maybe its just a damn good router?

Nah, joking aside, i guess the point of the article is to show how inefficient the system is running; so further discussion is pretty pointless.
 
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