Demonstration Products (Freelance)

[Cue]

So here's a brief story,

 

Having found that there's a lot of places paying thousands of pounds for systems that they shouldn't be charged that much for, whether it be due to overkill of the systems or purely overcharging for the service. It also came to light that myself and a friend of mine, both of whom are experienced network technicians, could probably freelance a lot of these jobs for some of the smaller companies (primarily schools) who wouldn't be so much looking for reputation as they would a good deal and good service (I can name a few schools off the bat where they'd probably go for some unknown company and wouldn't know if they were getting ripped off, but that's another story ).

 

So, say, for something like a wireless system (which for a primary school would be some access points and a lot of wires, maybe running DD-WRT on the APs alongside WPA2 and Chillispot authenticating to active directory perhaps? More user friendly on their end than fiddling with allowing MAC addresses and such) we'd need to test out some APs first to know what the best ones for this particular job would be, and so here's the question.

 

What would be the best way to go about getting hold of some demo products from companies such as Linksys, D-Link, even Netgear if they want to blow the bank? Can't say it's something I generally deal with, and usually if it is it'll be them coming down to demo, but we'd want to do our own testing instead, through highly sophisticated methods such as walking around with laptops seeing how far we can go before we go out of range of each AP . Along with researching their love for DD-WRT (not actually installing it on the APs they give unless the sales/marketing department would actually let us actually do that, depends on how dedicated their sales reps are to making a sale I guess).

 

Cheers

Cue out.