Millions spent on high-end routers for small, rural areas

“Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette reporter Eric Eyre found that the state of West Virginia used $24 million in federal stimulus money to purchase more than a thousand “enterprise-class” Internet routers at $22,600 each even though the West Virginia Office of Technology warned that the routers were “grossly oversized.

“The report states that the high-end routers were designed to serve research universities, large corporations and major medical centers, but the state is installing the pricey devices primarily in small, rural libraries and schools. The newspaper also uncovered that hundreds of the routers are sitting in their boxes, unused, two years after the purchase.”