How many times have you seen someone with a Rolex and have asked, “Is that a fake?” It is a common question because some luxury products are so desirable that there has been a huge market for cheap counterfeit copies. Some copies are so close to the original, it is very hard to discern the real one from the copy. Rolex is definitely a copied product and the copies outsell the originals.

Last week I attended a Building Industry Construction Services International (BICSI) conference in Orlando that included Ralph Frasca, president of Grand ISS, as a speaker who said that major corporations have been counterfeited into the billions of dollars. These corporations include Johnson & Johnson, Ford, GM and a myriad of others.

Frasca said it is more than reverse engineering a product today. Counterfeiters are more sophisticated and might even have an inside track to blueprints, marketing materials and anything else they can hack off of unprotected servers.

They say that imitation is the biggest form of flattery, but if you are the company that is losing out on product sales, you want that imitation product off the market.

Today, counterfeiting is a multi-billion dollar business with many entities creating copies but it is not restricted to the premium watches like Rolex, Cartier, Breitling and Movado or the upscale purses like Prada and Louis Vuitton. Counterfeit products now range from pharmaceuticals to electronics and even building cabling.

BUILDING CABLING? YES, BUILDING CABLING

You would think that something that is a basic building block of infrastructure for any commercial building would not be susceptible to cheap imitation but there is a good market for cabling as well as related connectors that go into a building.

With profit margins in the building industry cut to bare minimums due to fierce competition, the urge of contractors to seek out cheaper materials becomes the catalyst for counterfeiters to manufacture imitation cabling products.

The problem with the cheap knock-off cabling is that the buyer is unaware that the cabling is not going to perform as well as the real product. Testing that product as it is installed is the only way to find out if it has the same performance characteristics that the original product has.

If you are a building owner and the contractor installs inferior cable and connectors, you may not realize it until years later, especially if you are getting a cable system that's supposed to be futureproof and can support higher speeds later.

A REAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM

Those contractors that have an inclination for cutting corners to increase profits will look at this first as well as not putting in firestop materials in wall and floor penetrations in order to save money or get a bid down to the barebones minimum.

The counterfeit products might look and feel the same, but when it comes to connectivity performance, they might not be able to support one gigabit per second speeds, let alone 10 gigabit per second speeds like the original cable.

Rigorous enforcement of measuring cabling performance when it gets installed is a must have, not a hoped for. The contractor should test and certify everything before they install it.

As a building owner, getting what you think is a bargain today, might turn out to be an expensive nightmare with recurring incidences as tenants find out they cannot use the cabling system which does not support multi-gigabit speeds. Counterfeit cabling and connectors will cost building owners real money as they find out they cannot support the needs of current and future tenants.

Can't happen to you? It is estimated that 10% of all high-tech products are counterfeited worldwide.

Just as there is no such thing as a new $5,000 Rolls-Royce, there is no such thing as a $5,000 Formula One Yugo. Quality and high performance do not come cheap in cars or in cabling.

Carlini-ism: Quality and high performance do not come cheap in cars or in cabling.