That&#x27;s not what I said. The point I was making is that replicating their hardware functionality is a small part of the puzzle. Their customers are buying solutions and trust, not just hardware. So even <i>if</i> you replicate everything, they still have a business.<p>That said, there is plenty of high end networking gear that is hard to replace without getting into similar price territory. If you&#x27;re going to be handling throughput in the tens of Gbps per line card, with high enough availability to require everything (CPU, line cards, RAM) to be hot-swappable, you may be able to do that with PC&#x27;s, but you&#x27;re going to be looking at high end, high margin specialist servers of the type you won&#x27;t be buying in a local store.<p>And even assuming you can save on the server, you&#x27;ll still be paying for line cards and network cards that are produced in small quantities and that are high margin as well.