Feds Seize $78M of Bogus Chinese Cisco Gear

Ian Lamont writes "The IDG News Service is reporting that US and Canadian authorities have made more than 400 seizures of counterfeit Cisco hardware from China in an ongoing investigation that started in 2005. The most recent seizure was last Friday in Toronto, where the RCMP charged two people and a company with distributing large quantities of counterfeit network components to companies in the US through the Internet. The RCMP seized approximately 1,600 pieces of counterfeit network hardware with an estimated value of $2 million, says the report. According to another source, bogus Cisco gear from China typically includes network modules, WAN interface cards, gigabit interface converters, and less expensive routers."

Re:Not really counterfeit

[Brian Gordon]

Yeah that confused me too.. it's apparently perfectly good equipment, but they're not licensed to use the Cisco name. And of course they stole the design (I don't mean in an IP sense, I mean that I suspect that there was actual theivery involved in obtaining it).

Re:Not really counterfeit

[fyoder]

According to the article, could be the same stuff:

What has happened is that many of the companies that do the outsourcing for Cisco now run an extra shift and sell the now counterfeit hardware out the back door. After all, they have the manufacturing capability, the expertise and the full blessing of Cisco.

It's not the same as 2nds, or cheap knock offs with fake labels. It would suck if you were getting duped, esp. if paying full Cisco prices, but for a very steep discount there are probably customers who would knowingly buy these even though it means forgoing warranty.

Re:Not really counterfeit

[0100010001010011]

Or it could be a '3rd shift' operation. Same factory, same 'workers' but what they do after the 1st and 2nd "authentic" shifts are finished is swap out all 'good' electronics for cheap replacements.

Say Cisco specified a 1 ohm SMT resistor that has a .09% failure rate and costs $1/per (yes, it's just an example). When the '3rd shift' comes on board, they swap those out for 1 ohm resistors with a 5% failure rate but that only cost $.50/per. So it may even be the same assembly line but the components are much cheaper and not to Cisco specification, which is why Cisco doesn't stamp them as 'authorized'. And also why they may fail down the line long after the seller has disappeared.

Some gear doesnt work

[Gadgit]

Had actually received some of this gear unknowingly and while some of it does work...there were a few cases where that when a switch that would lose power the GBIC would not come back up in a 'no shut' state. Instead you had to console into the switch and issue a 'shut > no shut' on the interdace to get the port to come back. So while the technically do kind of work, it is not something I would recommend deploying in a mission critical switch/router.

Re:Not really counterfeit

[Quixotic]

i found it for $40, but still pretty expensive... http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=105365 [cdw.com]