Cisco hardware -- in Cisco's ideal world -- is always acquired from a Cisco partner. Partners range from a small shop that is merely officially authorized to sell common parts all the way to a Gold Partner with at least eight Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts, other staff members who are climbing the Cisco certification ladder, and a sales volume commitment to Cisco which they must meet.

But reality is a good deal different from what Cisco would like to see. Cisco holds a huge share of the routing and switching market, and its products retain value for many years in the thriving telecommunications aftermarket business. Handling refurbished Cisco equipment has been fun and profitable for many years, but counterfeiters are an increasing problem.

As a network architect, I see it all the time.

Yesterday evening, for example, during some troubleshooting with a customer we determined that their 2004-vintage Cisco 2650 router just wasn't up to doing all the work we were throwing at it, so the decision was made to replace the unit with a new Cisco 2821.

The customer's Cisco 2650 contained a single-port T1 data card that isn't compatible with the 28xx series so we had to source a second-generation board, the WIC-1DSU-T1-V2, for that role. My company is an authorized reseller, and we typically use Comstor, which is the smallest of the three Cisco product distributors, as a source for our equipment. I logged in to my Web account and looked up the card: US$1,000 list, $691.49 with our authorized partner level discount of about 30 percent.