To be fair, networking is hellish for a variety of reasons.

That has nothing to do with it. My company maintains network software for server instances which maintain thousands of simultaneous user connections continuously (and loads of continuous bandwidth). Simple "networking is tough" is not an answer for why it apparently costs this company half-a-mill a month to maintain 32 active connections. There is no good answer to that. It's just poor management/bureaucracy, including their choice of infrastructure. And labor, obviously.