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"Steal them"

As a netops guy thats worked his way up to net engineer since the late 90's in the F500 space, I still think disappearing your client's equipment even if old/obsolete without their permission is just theft.

Even without experience in the SMB space, it shouldn't take that much brain power to realize that SMB's don't have the capital to engage in such an upgrade cycle.

I can state that even the F500's I work for all have C3560's still in-place.

As a Network Consultant, you should be able to do standard network discovery across their network, and identify what equipment will not support the architecture they have in place.

Part of this may include re-architecting as necessary, and upgrading equipment to support things like trunking, vlan's, etc.

From there you should be able to pull together a proper business justification for new equipment, services, etc.

We all would like to be able to get a client's out-dated mish-mash of equipment upgraded to something modern and coherent.

But the problem is, while that might be what we want, the client is always going to ask if there is any way to keep limping along as they have been.

If you think about it, we do the same thing when the car is in the shop. We get a list of things that NEED to be replace, and there are others that should, or could be replaced.

The problem in the author's story seems to be coming to inherit a customer who was either sold a bill of goods with D-Link or other consumer equipment, or a customer who pushed their original Network consultant to minimize cost as the primary goal.

To some extent, you DO get what you pay for.

While it might seem iffy, eBay has tons of Cisco gear available for pennies on the dollar. I was going to recommend 3560's for general LAN switches, however just checked and it looks like even 3750's are available in abundance down to $125.

This presupposes the client actually needs more advanced equipment.