Badgernet contract or how SBC eats Wisconsin

I have been looking over some of the Badger net documentation and it looks to me like a stinky deal for the State.

For some background read http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/mar05/307419.asp

Generally JS may wish to be hush on Badgernet, since JS owned Norlight is a contractor.

Some points:

The UW System and Wiscnet had concerns about the contract, where is the Wiscnet side of the story?

The State could save money by building network down to Chicago. Most all the world's network providers are in Chicago. On the ISP price list SBC/Norlight will sell Badgernet Internet bandwidth for $75/megabit in large quantities. When a provider aggregates more than a gigabit of traffic you can find providers in Chicago willing to sell at sub $50/megabit and as low as $20/megabit.

We have a large state aggregator of IP traffic, it is called Wiscnet.

Badgernet eliminates market forces and makes SBC the preferred provider.

Investigative taxpayers need to follow the money.

http://ethics.state.wi.us/scripts/2003Session/LEOEL.asp?PrinID=2915