The $100 million price differential between the Alcatel-Lucent and proposals to refresh California State University's 23-campus network that we was based on an identical number of switches and routers in various configurations.

CSU allowed Network World to review spreadsheets calculating the eight-year total cost of ownership of each of the five bidders for the project.

The price discrepancy between Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent sparked off a on the Network World site that the bids did not represent a fair, apples-to-apples comparison. When asked if the number of network elements Cisco proposed drastically outnumbered those of the other bidders, , director of cyberinfrastructure at CSU, replied "Absolutely not."

"Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet," he said. "Every campus had two border routers, two cores, and two farm switches. All the vendors had to propose exactly the same solution" based on the average number of servers deployed at each CSU campus. "All of this is based on exactly the same data to all of the vendors. It's exactly the same formula for all of the vendors."

ENGARDE!