If you had worked in a big company environment, you would know that this kind of nonsense happens all the time, in both private and public environments. 30000$ routers are pocket money compared to some of the things I have seen (millions of $ spent to develop and maintain in-house software that cannot do 10 % of what a basic open source solution would do).
When you reach a certain size, and you have many competing groups, all with their agenda with the same company, it becomes difficult to allocate resources correctly, especially in a domain that is not considered "core of business" (IT being a common case, sadly).
you should see the crazy amount big companies spend on IBM tools. people pay big money for clearcase.
licenses for clearcase cost enormous amounts. yet clearcase is missing many of the features found in open-source (and free) distributed version control systems. meanwhile, there is no free alternative to the routers, which may actually be necessary at some of the installed locations.
this doesn't include the huge server costs to run clearcase after you buy the license, which aren't necessary for distributed version control systems like git or mercurial. and big companies often spend more money buying other IBM tools to integrate for which free alternatives exist...
the amount of money spent on this purchase is fucking peanuts compared to what many large private sector companies spend on IBM software that lacks most of the features found in your favorite open-source alternative.
When you reach a certain size, and you have many competing groups, all with their agenda with the same company, it becomes difficult to allocate resources correctly, especially in a domain that is not considered "core of business" (IT being a common case, sadly).