Procuring genuine IT hardware products from a reputable source is vital to ensuring that networking products can be supported, will provide the correct functionality, compatibility and life span guarantees, and that it will be covered by warranty.

Thousands of networking products are produced abroad in the Far East each year and flood the world market looking identical to authentic products. The scale of the problem was recently highlighted in the case of a New York hardware reseller who netted m passing off as genuine bogus Cisco networking equipment. His two and a half year prison sentence and .2m fine shows how seriously this problem is taken and the cost of dealing in bogus kit.

However, the huge potential reward is a big temptation to some unscrupulous dealers.
It is often not possible to establish whether hardware is the real thing by simply looking at them, or indeed by using them, as the fake branding and functionality is so convincing. This causes problems for both the hardware manufacturers and their potential customers, as very often the product’s origin only becomes evident when a warranty issue arises, leaving customers angry and disgruntled and manufacturers frustrated and helpless – not to mention out of pocket. In fact, millions of pounds are lost every year through fake product flooding into the European and US markets – both in terms of revenue for manufacturers and of productivity, resale value and associated costs for users.

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