are these items really counterfeit or is this just Cisco enlisting the aid of customs etc. to prevent grey imports from undermining their vast profit margin of "officially" sanctioned goods?

This is what i said last time... "Fake Cisco Routers"

At least we know they fake em good now.

"In January two US brothers were charged with various crimes after they allegedly sold counterfeit Cisco equipment to several government agencies including the FBI, the Federal Aviation Authority and the Marine Corps"

You must have balls the size of watermelons to sell hokey kit to the Feds. Either that, or be a window-licking retard itchin' for some private time at Rikers Island.

I wonder how many of these are actually running on peoples networks.

I've had a fake cisco switch. When it broke 5 minutes after opening the box I rang support and when I gave them the S/N they said it was sold in Saudi Arabia!

Did they have a user-friendly self-explanatory interface? Or was it that they failed to do a hostile takeover on all ajoining boxes in the warehouse?

But, on a more serious note, I agree with the others that it would be nice to know if these are copycat electronics (with IOS?) or if they are genuine Cisco kit (or Cisco factory rejects) bound for the gray (or 'grey'? is that like 'color/colour'?) market.

Hmmmm, if a deep pocketed organisation wanted to reduce the encryption key space used by select people, an interesting approach would be to sell them gear that "looks like the real thing", but actually has its encryption keys set to a known value...

Hmmm.... ;->

Oh dear. Are the lizardmen sending fake Cisco kit with built-in mind control to the unwary public?

seems to me that this may very well be much more than 'fake' kit.

i mean, if it looks and works the way it's supposed to then it's feasable to think that just maybe they have some interesting additions/modifications that allow access to the dodgy 'maker', as suggested in previous comment.

think about it... if China wanted easy access to USA fbi (and other sensitive) networks.. all they would have to do is to manage to sell fake (but convincing and fully working) networking gear to them to implement on their networks...

once installed, bingo.. covert access achieved. and what's more, perhaps the makers of the fake gear are able to do other things like shutdown the devices..