I totally agree. We were contacted by a school in Brooklyn to help them understand what they were spending $200K on. When we got involved their "approved vendor" was borderline threatening us. We were not "approved" so we could not do the work but we gave them a quote for reference. It was under $40K. I felt really bad that government funds were being used so inefficiently and the children were not being helped but I just didn't want to get involved in the work at all. We now stay away from any school board related work.
When we sat down with the principal and the other vendor and went down their quote line by line they finally snapped and started yelling at us that they were working on this for over a year and we didn't understand what was involved and that they have to inflate their prices to recover their costs because they could only make money on the items and not the service... It was crazy. A company run this way would be unheard of. I think I am now in favor of privatizing the school system. Although I probably don't understand the mess that would cause. I don't know what I am going to do when I have kids, but if I see stuff like this happening at my kid's school I am going to flip out. I am sure someone is making tons of money on this Housing wireless project and I tend to agree that efforts showing the communities how to do it themselves cheaper would help them more. But I have a feeling that they would meet resistance when trying to use government money on anything we would suggest. But we could also include tips on how to raise the money needed within the community and further break the ties to the government and help them build a more self sufficient community. | Larry Velez | http://sinu.com | -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Bob Keyes Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 1:16 PM To: Anthony Townsend Cc: NYCwireless List; Telecom-Cities Subject: Re: [nycwireless] GovTech - "Connection for All " On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Anthony Townsend wrote: > > The infrastructure, which cost the Portsmouth Redevelopment and > Housing Authority (PRHA) $36,000 for a server, antenna and service, is > already $36K? what the heck did they buy, a T3? Not likely. More likely the equipment and service had to be purchased through an 'approved' vendor, with a lot of expensive consulting. This is another example of why we shouldn't have government involved with building wireless networks. It's another example of waste and abuse. I'd rather the residents themselves put together the $1k for a really good rooftop AP and about $70/mo for a shareable DSL circuit. -- -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
