"A bizarre operation": Why West Virginia stuck $22,600 routers in tiny libraries

West Virginia's Charleston Gazette has been hopping mad this week as one of its reporters learned that the state has been sticking 1,064 high-end $22,600 routers into “little public institutions as small as rural libraries with just one computer terminal.”

When reporter Eric Eyre actually called up Cisco posing as a customer, he was told by a rep that the company's 3945 series routers were "our router solution for campus and large enterprises, so this is overkill for your network." Instead, the rep recommended a far cheaper commercial grade router for $500. And while the 3945 series routers might be massively overkill for many of the locations to which they have been deployed, 366 of them aren't even being used. Instead, they're sitting in a warehouse. The money for the routers came from federal stimulus funds designed to boost broadband access by better equipping public facilities like schools and libraries, especially in more rural areas. West Virginia officials decided not to vary the size of the routers they purchased based on the needs of the target facility. "A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students," one official told the paper. In a series of articles, the Charleston Gazette has highlighted the scramble to spend the stimulus money back in 2010. Bids for the work went out quickly. By the time someone in the state Office of Technology wrote in an e-mail that “this equipment may be grossly oversized for several of the facilities in which it is currently slated to be installed," it was too late. The $24 million contract for the routers went to Verizon Network Integration, which had the lowest bid.