$2b network is worth $2

[ak_47_boy]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...er-wants-scrap

I have an idea. Go to walmart and buy a few wireless doorbells and save $1999999950.

Fun fact time:
- 2 billion dollars could buy 2.5 million miles of cat5 cable. That is about 8 times to the moon and back. Or 100 times around the planet earth.
- 2.5 million miles of cat5 cable would weigh 140000 tons. That is a quarter of what the world trade center weighed.
- If you really want to go wireless 2 billion dollars could buy 66 million WRT54 routers. You can then bury ground zero in about 20 feet deep of routers. All for a combined throughput of 3564 terabytes per second.

Or use the $2b to hire 4500 more police officers for 10 years. This way walking the streets of NYC may be safer then walking the streets of Baghdad.

[gallardo]

September 11, 2001 World Trade Center 'demolitions'

Discreet.

Yeah, the 4500 police officers seems like the better deal.

[villa1n]

Discreet.

Yeah, the 4500 police officers seems like the better deal.

yeah, 4500 more nypd.... do you guys read the news... at all? ..

[inCore]

yeah, 4500 more nypd.... do you guys read the news... at all? ..

What news do you mean? If you mean newspapers/TV news, I'm not sure the news stations in Bucharest will tell you about policemen in NY.

If you mean the news in the article, I still don't understand what you mean.

[AliG]

yeah honestly, the article is about NY debating whether or not to spend $2b on a faulty wireless program. That money could be put towards much better use

[W1zzard]

how is that worth $2 ? you know that professionals setting up a professional network which can be used under disaster situations will cost a load of $$ per hour.

no you can't use some crappy home-consumer wireless equipment. how many rescue workers (cops, firemen, doctors, hospitals, ntl. guard) will need to use that system? do some basic math on the bandwidth requirements.

if the system worked and was delivered on time i'd say 2b is very reasonable

[villa1n]

What news do you mean? If you mean newspapers/TV news, I'm not sure the news stations in Bucharest will tell you about policemen in NY.

If you mean the news in the article, I still don't understand what you mean.

even international news site cover the ridiculous stuff nypd has been pulling. just watch reddit.

[ak_47_boy]

how is that worth $2 ? you know that professionals setting up a professional network which can be used under disaster situations will cost a load of $$ per hour.

no you can't use some crappy home-consumer wireless equipment. how many rescue workers (cops, firemen, doctors, hospitals, ntl. guard) will need to use that system? do some basic math on the bandwidth requirements.

if the system worked and was delivered on time i'd say 2b is very reasonable

Really, they can't use WRT54g routers Bandwidth? What are they downloading movies? Wages? With $1b they could 10000 engineers for a year.

$10m is reasonable.

[W1zzard]

police officers in ny: 37838
firemen in ny: 14000
doctors in new york: 39447

so let's assume 50k people are going to use this system in total. if 50% of these people should be able to talk at the same time using phone quality connections (48 kbit) you need: 1.2 gbit of wireless bandwidth. add some 128 kbit internet/fax connections for 10% of these people: 640 mbit.

a single cisco aironet 1410 wireless bridge is about $3k .. how many do you need for this installation? 10k ? to timely deploy this you'd need to hire like 500 engineers ? oh wait, they need tools, cars and gas, someone to make the plans where to go. so we need maybe 100 more people to make those plans, those guys need offices.

what kind of end devices will those 50k people get? should people share one? so maybe another 10k phones/wireless receivers transmitters.

last but not least the company who sets up this thing wants to make some profit on this big project. if you can make it for 10m go to the city council and propose it.

[ak_47_boy]

60 thousand beautiful top quality radios at $1000 a piece would cost $60m. Oh no, there goes 3% of our budget.

The time that this emergency communication network would be needed most is during a massive power outage. Your 10 thousand Cisco wireless boxs aren't going to have power

You have to have about 50 gigabit access points spread out across the city on rooftops. Each one complete with battery backup and a generator. I don't know exactly how much this will cost all said and done. Not more them $50m.

I guess at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how much it costs as long as it works. They just print the money as it is needed anyways.

[gallardo]

police officers in ny: 37838
firemen in ny: 14000
doctors in new york: 39447

so let's assume 50k people are going to use this system in total. if 50% of these people should be able to talk at the same time using phone quality connections (48 kbit) you need: 1.2 gbit of wireless bandwidth. add some 128 kbit internet/fax connections for 10% of these people: 640 mbit.

a single cisco aironet 1410 wireless bridge is about $3k .. how many do you need for this installation? 10k ? to timely deploy this you'd need to hire like 500 engineers ? oh wait, they need tools, cars and gas, someone to make the plans where to go. so we need maybe 100 more people to make those plans, those guys need offices.

what kind of end devices will those 50k people get? should people share one? so maybe another 10k phones/wireless receivers transmitters.

last but not least the company who sets up this thing wants to make some profit on this big project. if you can make it for 10m go to the city council and propose it.

10k x 3k = 30M
500 x 50k = 25M
let's say 50M in tools, cars and gas and 100 people to make plans
A receiver should be no more than 1000$ each. so 50k x 1000$ = 50M

30+25+50+50= 155 million dollars.

WHERE THE HELL DOES THE REST OF THE 1845 MILLION DOLLARS GO ???


Seriously. Whenever government contracts are involved, the companies who get the deals overprice by over 500%. Just look at the 900$ toilet seats the US army uses.
And it's not just the US. This kind of stuff happens everywhere in the world. The Romanian government spent a lot of millions of dollars and a highway of which not even 1Km of road has been built. The cost of the highway has been estimated at over double the price/Km that of highways in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

[ahmad]

10k x 3k = 30M
500 x 50k = 25M
let's say 50M in tools, cars and gas and 100 people to make plans
A receiver should be no more than 1000$ each. so 50k x 1000$ = 50M

30+25+50+50= 155 million dollars.

WHERE THE HELL DOES THE REST OF THE 1845 MILLION DOLLARS GO ???


Seriously. Whenever government contracts are involved, the companies who get the deals overprice by over 500%. Just look at the 900$ toilet seats the US army uses.
And it's not just the US. This kind of stuff happens everywhere in the world. The Romanian government spent a lot of millions of dollars and a highway of which not even 1Km of road has been built. The cost of the highway has been estimated at over double the price/Km that of highways in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

You forgot wages which W1zzard mentioned:

100 employees * $50,000/year * 3 years = 15 mil

Thats assuming you want only 100 employees.. my guess is easily double that so say 30 mil.

50 mil is not enough for tools and gas. How cheap do you think it is to wire all of NY? Forget about the materials. What about the digging, drilling, building server/router rooms?

Assuming they want to use fibre optic cables, thats another couple of million there too. Then you have transcievers and servers at both ends.

What about service contract, bandwidth costs.. you think bandwidth is free?

And the biggest issue is of course, that we don't know how long this contract will last, it could be a $2 billion contract for 4-5 years.

What about the software developers that will create an application to handle communication with custom protocols? That alone should drain a large number of resources.

A wage of $50k a year is only reasonable for average working class. When you have managers, execs, and administrators, they would easily be making 3x that or more. We could assume for every 5-10 employees there is a manager.. so 20 managers at $100k = 2mil, then four or five that manage those managers at $150k = another mil or so. PER YEAR.

Its easy to over simplify. Once you get down to the details, a few million here and a few million there.. how much does it cost to build a data warehouse these days? Or was the data going to be stored on dvds?

[Oliver]

You are so true w1zzard

[gallardo]

Lets face it... 155M is for the biggest costs in the project. You can't honestly suggest all the rest costs 1845 million dollars, do you?