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Comment by aosmith | Hacker News Reader

There are a few tiers of fake products. The same is roughly true for sneakers, handbags, etc.

(A) Real products that are being sold on the black market, think of these as stolen from the factory. They're cheaper because nobody is paying the royalties.

(B) High quality knock offs that are made at the same factory with the same materials and tools. These might be slightly less well made.

Most people encounter A and B without ever knowing it.

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These knock-offs of Cisco 2960X's definitely fall into category B. They'd be next to impossible to identify in the field:

https://www.servethehome.com/fake-cisco-switches-in-the-supp...

This is one reason I avoid Amazon like the plague. It's absolutely filled with fake products of all tiers and there's often no reliable way to verify this as a consumer. Retailers are supposed to have a secure and verified supply chain but apparently Amazon doesn't see the point in this, they co-mingle inventory and will deliver you a fake product with the same SKU.

I wonder if they get away with it because for most people the fake is good enough?

You can't really conclude that if consumers never find out they're getting fakes. When fakes fail or cause issues, they blame the original company. Amazon shares product ratings/reviews of an SKU.

There is also Grey Market, goods sold at a discount in other nations then reimported back to the US, dont know if that popular with enterprise gear but it for sure is with consumer electronics, and other product groups (like books which is legal now thanks to the US Supreme court)

That's category A...

Sure, but the obvious question is why we would care about "counterfeit" Cisco equipment that is... technically... only if you're an obnoxious pedant... but technically... exactly identical to genuine Cisco equipment.

Updates. Warranty.

Is the vendor offering a counterfeit warranty? What do the updates and warranty have to do with it?

If it was made overseas and didn’t go through the same QA process for production Cisco equipment, I’d be worried it’d be bugged.

If it's something for the defense industry they definitely care.

Other people have mentioned the software update/warranty problem. Another problem is these counterfeit devices are usually not “identical” in any meaningful sense of the word. While they might look the same, the counterfeiters typically swap lower quality parts (think things like capacitors and other similar components) whenever they can, and the devices fail prematurely or sporadically.

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