The company I'm working for now doesn't stock anything. I mean NOTHING. They buy everything on a per-job basis, and God forbid that I have a system down or need to replace a phone. The customer has to just wait until they order the part, usually from Amazon. It's not uncommon for people to wait a week for a replacement power supply. All they're interested in doing is scaring customers into buying their hosted IP crap. It's a joy being face-to-face with the customer in those instances.
Anyway, the same applies with cable, and they buy the cheapest thing that they can find on Amazon. The last project we did yielded us four boxes of "CAT5e" cable, PVC (there aren't any plenum environments here). The boxes were no-name, no UL, ETL or other approvals, Chinese made and they put mod plugs on each end of the 1,000 foot box. How nice of them. It was terrible. It knotted about every ten feet, so someone had to stand there and pull it out/straighten it for the puller. The jacket was soft and snagged on just about everything. One cable failed completely after installation, with all four pairs being shorted. It couldn't have happened on a simple run. Oh no... It was in a large retail store with 15 foot ceilings, all the way across the place. Their bargain $45.00 Chinese knock-off crap ended up costing the labor for two men to go back and replace the run. Who knows how long the rest of the runs will hold up?
