The most common method is remarking of reclaimed components.  Parts are cannibalized from eWaste, e.g. monitors, PC’s, scrapped circuit board, etc. and then sanded, recoated and remarked with identical date lot codes.  However, there have been countless occasions, when a component of the same size characteristic, has been modified with such expertise, that it has successfully passed through as a completely different part.

Why has Counterfeiting become so prevalent? 

1. Obsolescence – Technology changes at a very rapid pace and as such, what is state-of-the art today, becomes the technology of yore tomorrow.  However, the circuit boards onto which they are populated, cannot be modified to accommodate the newer technology without great time and expense.   So, it is more cost effective to seek out the older technology.
2. Demand – Electronics component pricing ranges from a fraction of a penny, to thousands of dollars per unit.  Therefore, it is a very lucrative business for the counterfeiter, where eWaste is abundant and demand for any given component can be found daily, through online databases.
3. Profits – In today’s economic climate, costs have soared and margins have shrunk.  More companies are willing to roll the dice with off-shore components, in an effort to enhance their bottom line.

What’s being done to stop Counterfeiting?

It’s virtually impossible to identify every counterfeiter, when electronic components sourcing is a global industry.  But consortiums such as GIDEP (GOVERNMENT – INDUSTRY DATA EXCHANGE PROGRAM) are making great strides in identifying companies who supply substandard material, through incident reporting and members receive daily alerts.

OEMs and CEMs are performing in-depth on-site audits of their tier three distributors, to ensure a quality program is in place and counterfeit avoidance measures are being taken.

Distributors must establish bests of practices regarding counterfeit avoidance.  Components must be compared against OEM datasheets for size and markings.  There are a variety of tests that can be performed to authenticate any given component.  But at a mimimum, one part per date lot code should be decapsulated for die verification.  X-ray is available to ensure bond wires are intact, where applicable.  And, electrical testing to manufacturer’s specification is yet another method commonly utilized in component verification. Recently the Global Access staff attended a seminar on export enforcement. The government has strong controls in place to ensure that Mil-Spec electronics do not fall into the wrong hands. More to come on that next post.

Global Access Unlimited, Inc. is an electrical distributor located in Tampa Bay, Florida.  We are an independent, woman owned small business that has long been fulfilling the needs of the military and other governmental organizations as well as commercial interests.  We offer board level components, structured cabling and lighting solutions to the commercial through military markets, as well as state, county and city governments.  We provide only top quality material and our customer service is second to none!

We specialize in sourcing obsolete and long lead time components through our Global Network of strategic partnerships that we have formed over the last several decades.  Global Access Unlimited, Inc. assists customers in selling their excess inventory through a variety of programs including line item purchases and lot purchases.

As you may or may not be aware, there is grant money out there these days from the government. The ARRA or    American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has impacted everything from HVAC to LED lighting. A large chunk was made available for the telecommunication industry. Many rural communities simply did not have internet or bundled services for their home or businesses until now.

For the Contractor!

The influx of money has meant new business, but it has also meant long lead times on products. Finding Multimode Fiber with less than a 12 to 36 week lead time that is also RUS approved has become a challenge and supply and demand drive prices up.

Terms like Fiber To The Home or FTTH and FTTx meaning Fiber To Whatever have become common place. Wow the world is changing, huh!!  Well in fact not really it may surprise you to know the the United States is number 10 in fiber installs behind such countries as Lithuania and Latvia! What happened there! Well enter the ARRA to remedy that.

For the End User!

Why is all of this happening? Well enter the 4G phones and iPads. With such high Data demands we need more speed. Soon 100+ Gigs GPS will be needed. Steven Jobs and his foresight in communications left a lasting imprint. Not to mention projects such as ”The Last Mile” meaning that even where not where economically feasible Fiber Optic backbones are being installed much like Eisenhower did with the Freeway system and putting Americans back to work, the ARRA act is helping Americans Recover by putting in a ”Future Proof” technology backbone as Fiber has no speed limits on band width except the speed of light.

Morale of the Story

Network speed and capabilities is just getting started, in the next decade we can expect systems to run 100 times faster than they currently do. As an end user this means that Dick Tracy wrist watches will become a reality. We can already see what the Ardroid phones and Iphone have done for communication around the world.

Stay tuned!!

Questions? Contact   Will Arthur warthur@gauinc.com

Global Access Unlimited, Inc. is an electrical distributor located in Tampa Bay, Florida.  We are an independent, woman owned small business that has long been fulfilling the needs of the military and other governmental organizations as well as commercial interests.  We offer board level components, structured cabling and lighting solutions to the commercial through military markets, as well as state, county and city governments.  We provide only top quality material and our customer service is second to none!

We specialize in sourcing obsolete and long lead time components through our Global Network of strategic partnerships that we have formed over the last several decades.  Global Access Unlimited, Inc. assists customers in selling their excess inventory through a variety of programs including line item purchases and lot purchases.

AKA Outside Plant refers to cabling that connects offices and homes together outdoors. You most likely drive by all types of projects everyday without even realizing it.  The more our world goes wireless the more outdoor cabling is required to support that. From your iPad 3 to your smart phone whether or not you are playing  ‘words with friends’ on Facebook or submitting a proposal to the US Military it is becoming a wireless world.

Two Main Categories

Burial and Aerial. Sometime you bury sometimes you don’t. This all depends on the hardness of the ground or the obstacles that are in place, it could be as simple as no access to the ‘right of way’, or perhaps there is a ravine in the way. Aerial Cabling is highly  specialized and requires different mounting depending on whether you are using fiber optic cable or copper aerial cable such as figure eight.

What if you wanted to connect two buildings together that 1000 feet apart? For this example lets go with Burial Cabling. Here is a real world example I had a few years ago.

A church was building a new school that was about 1500 feet away for the main server and they wanted, voice, data and security available at the new location. They had planned to hire a contractor but wanted to buy the material themselves to save some money

What would you need and how would you do it?

First you would need to decide between fiber and copper. The obvious choice here is fiber and the maximum effective run with a Cat5e or Cat6 copper solution is 100 meters unless you use signal amplifiers . A shorter run would work fine with a burial Cat5e cable, but there would still be different sub categories of cable to choose from there as well.

Ok, so we are using fiber. What kind? Lots of factors here as well, indoor/outdoor or outdoor fiber there are uses for both. Typically if you must go into the building 75 to 150 feet indoor/outdoor fiber optic cable is best due to the bend insensitivity.

Next we need to select the fiber strand count and whether it is multimode or single mode. Wow this is all complex stuff right? No, not at all. Single mode or SM is for really really long runs and MM or Multimode is for shorter runs. Keep in mind fiber can run for miles. Always buy  a few more strands on your fiber than you need for future expansion, it is cheap to do so and just makes sense.

Now we will need innerduct, ( a flexible conduit to protect the fiber) , media converters to convert a fiber optic signal back into copper for our network, a NEMA 3 or better fiber enclosure and some fiber jumpers as well as patch cords.

At this point if you are not a contractor you might want to consider hiring a BISCI certified one to do the install or call a knowledgeable distributor to walk you though the multitude of product selections. Speaking with tenured sales people with some installation experience is your best bet.

Custom kitting by the job is the way to go, that way you can get the proper components from one knowledgeable source with experience that knows what works.

Tune in for our next posting on Aerial Cabling!

Global Access Unlimited, Inc. is an electrical distributor located in Tampa Bay, Florida.  We are an independent, woman owned small business that has long been fulfilling the needs of the military and other governmental organizations as well as commercial interests.  We offer board level components, structured cabling and lighting solutions to the commercial through military markets, as well as state, county and city governments.  We provide only top quality material and our customer service is second to none!

We specialize in sourcing obsolete and long lead time components through our Global Network of strategic partnerships that we have formed over the last several decades.  Global Access Unlimited, Inc. assists customers in selling their excess inventory through a variety of programs including line item purchases and lot purchases.

Do you ever wonder why your internet or computer runs slow one minute and not the next?

99% of Network problems lie in the design of the cabling system.

Today’s networks have high demands; people want voice, phone, video, security and entertainment at ever increasing speeds on tap 24/7.

Just a few years ago people were delighted to have a TV dinner that was ready in 30 minutes, now we tap our foot in front of the microwave when it takes 3 minutes.

IPad 1, then iPad 2 now the IPad 3, first 3G then 4Gment on demand at ever higher speeds over cable and wireless.

     One thing is for sure! Information technology systems (ITS) and cabling requirements are always changing, everything is constantly speeding up and the Office buildings and even homes these days need high performance cabling systems for Internet, entertainment and intranet capability. In many offices, homes and buildings cabling systems are now integrated with voice, data, security, paging, video , wireless and environmental controls.

People waste millions of dollars every year due to improper design and installation. Most network problems are directly related to the performance of the cabling system.

This short article introduces you to the basics on cabling and there are many aspects that we will delve into over the next few articles. The subjects are below.

• OSP
• Premise
• Codes, standards and regulations
• Media
• Electrical protection
• Firestopping
• Cabling system development
• Work inspection
• Moves, adds or changes
• Retrofits
• Project implementation
• Cloud? OSP relates?

  Nearly every customer we have is constantly adding or upgrading their own facility or in many ways providing services for their customers. Most contractors provide services to the military upgrading their data centers or adding new “drops” to existing offices or new ones as their organizations grow.

 The International Standard for design training is provided by a group called BICSI and the HQ for them is in Tampa. Check out their website for a lot more info.

                                                                                                           www.bisci.com

   IF you are hiring a contractor or you are a contractor having certifications from this group are very important to ensure proper materials and proper installations.

Stay tuned for more articles to come on Structured Cabling 101 with Will Arthur

Global Access Unlimited, Inc. is an electrical distributor located in Tampa Bay, Florida.  We are an independent, woman owned small business that has long been fulfilling the needs of the military and other governmental organizations as well as commercial interests.  We offer board level components, structured cabling and lighting solutions to the commercial through military markets, as well as state, county and city governments.  We provide only top quality material and our customer service is second to none!

We specialize in sourcing obsolete and long lead time components through our Global Network of strategic partnerships that we have formed over the last several decades.  Global Access Unlimited, Inc. assists customers in selling their excess inventory through a variety of programs including line item purchases and lot purchases.

Well, behind the scenes of the highly popular Social Networking site, Facebook has spent over a billion dollars in upgrades, including 600 million in 2011 and an additional 500 million planned for 2012.  The company plans 3 more 300,000 sf data centers, in the coming months, to provide scores of new IT jobs and careers!

Facebook’s IPO today on the NASDAQ exchange, is welcome news to many of Facebook’s employees and investors.  But it is also welcome news for development in the data center industry.  Their IPO, will provide Facebook with the capital they’ll need to satisfy Wall Street, as well as their investors.

Spending?

Facebook’s  spending has boosted data center construction, which is good for manufacturers and also has added jobs for the  IT sector and facilities staff.  Facebook has released its server and data center designs through the Open Compute Project, further influencing spending and innovation in the industry.

Currently, the Social Networking Giant  has announced three huge data center campuses where it is building new server farms which can support at least three 300,000 square foot buildings.

To date, Facebook has opened only two of these facilities – one in Prineville, Oregon and  the other in Forest City, North Carolina.  The company has commenced construction on its first data center in Lulea, Sweden and its second buildings in Oregon and North Carolina. Once these are completed, Facebook will have space to build four more buildings across the three sites.

We can only imagine the international data center growth will keep pace with the domestic expansion. Complex yet simple and reliable Data Center Solutions are what sets aside best practices in data center designs.

Global Access Unlimited, Inc. is an electrical distributor located in Tampa Bay, Florida.  We are an independent, woman owned small business that has long been fulfilling the needs of the military and other governmental organizations as well as commercial interests.  We offer board level components, structured cabling and lighting solutions to the commercial through military markets, as well as state, county and city governments.  We provide only top quality material and our customer service is second to none!

We specialize in sourcing obsolete and long lead time components through our Global Network of strategic partnerships that we have formed over the last several decades.  Global Access Unlimited, Inc. assists customers in selling their excess inventory through a variety of programs including line item purchases and lot purchases.

We placed a P. O. for a few demo units and I couldn’t wait to show my customers and the reaction was the same from everyone!

Lumark XTOR Wallpack “Mighty Mite”

How could such a small and ruggedly built fixture be so well thought out , super bright , and best of all barely over $200.00! At only 30 watts, this “Mighty Mite”, replaces a 175 Metal Halide and has a forecast life of up to 15 years with zero maintenance.

Dark-Sky Rated -Lighting Pollution  Be Gone

The design engineers had their thinking cap on that day when they made it possible to mount this critter almost any way you can imagine. Wet rated and available in white or bronze , the Lumark XTOR LED Wallpack is available in a 10 , 20 , and 30 watt super high efficacy single Cree LED that is nearly impossibly bright.

At a mounting height of 35 feet a full cutoff pattern of 35′ by 150 ‘ is created making this the perfect wallpack where light pollution could be an issue.

Light Pollution you say?  Have you ever had a neighbor with a security light in their backyard that bleeds into your yard ruining any chance of a peaceful evening? Yeah, light pollution!  Visit Darksky.org for the full story.

Lumark Wallpack – Cute – Powerful and Affordable!

Call Global Access today and reserve yours!

Lumark Wallpack Brochure

Global Access Unlimited, Inc. is an electrical distributor located in Tampa Bay, Florida.  We are an independent, woman owned small business that has long been fulfilling the needs of the military and other governmental organizations as well as commercial interests.  We offer board level components, structured cabling and lighting solutions to the commercial through military markets, as well as state, county and city governments.  We provide only top quality material and our customer service is second to none!

We specialize in sourcing obsolete and long lead time components through our Global Network of strategic partnerships that we have formed over the last several decades.  Global Access Unlimited, Inc. assists customers in selling their excess inventory through a variety of programs including line item purchases and lot purchases.