Vendor lineage
Anixter
A distributor wrote the specification that became Cat 5 and Cat 6.
Alan and Bill Anixter started a wire and cable distribution business outside Chicago in 1957 - Wikipedia dates the start to 1956 - on a family loan the company puts at $10,000 and Wikipedia at $20,000 from their mother. Within a decade it was turning $10M. When WESCO bought it in 2020 for about $4.5B it had roughly 130,000 customers, 600,000 products and 316 warehouses across some fifty countries.
**Here is the thing worth knowing, and almost nobody does.** In 1989 Anixter published the **Levels** programme - the first written performance specification for data cabling systems. It was a distributor's document, produced so that customers could compare cable on measured performance rather than on the manufacturer's assurances. **The TIA standards body adopted it and renamed Levels to Categories.**
**Which means every network engineer alive who says Cat 5, Cat 5e or Cat 6 is using a vocabulary invented by a cable distributor**, for commercial reasons, and subsequently promoted into an international standard. That is a genuinely unusual route for a specification to travel, and it says something specific about where useful standards come from: **not always from the manufacturers, who have an interest in incomparability, nor from committees, who need something to standardise, but sometimes from whoever is stuck explaining the difference to a buyer.**
**The 1995 laboratory follows the same logic and is the other half of the argument.** Anixter opened an interoperability lab in Illinois with UL-verified test processes, and described itself as the only distributor with one. A distributor testing what it sells is doing something structurally odd - it is not the manufacturer, so it has no product to defend, and it is not the customer, so it has the volume to justify equipment nobody buying a single reel could afford. **That is the same neutrality argument this timeline makes about carrier-neutral exchanges and vendor-neutral certification, arriving in the least likely place: the middle of a supply chain.**
The growth mechanism was acquisition and it was explicit. Alan Anixter told the Chicago Tribune he carried a list of acquisition targets in his pocket, and the company bought nineteen businesses by the end of the 1960s. It listed on the American exchange in 1967 and the New York exchange in 1975, was acquired by the Itel holding company and later took the Anixter International name, passed $1B of sales in 1991 and $3B by 1999.
**The ending is one of the better-documented bidding wars in distribution.** Clayton, Dubilier & Rice bid $3.8B in October 2019, with a forty-day window allowing Anixter to seek better offers. WESCO appeared, and the price climbed through $3.9B, $4.0B, $4.3B and finally **$4.5B in January 2020**, at which point CD&R waived its matching rights. The combined business had pro-forma revenues around $17B, and the announcement projected $200M of annual cost savings by year three - **which in distribution means branches and distribution centres, because that is where the duplication is.**
**Read beside the other six distributors here, Anixter is the one that shaped what it sold rather than only moving it.** Ingram and Tech Data built logistics and credit; ScanSource picked a product thesis; Westcon and Arrow consolidated. This one wrote a specification the entire industry still speaks. **A distributor is usually described as a layer that adds cost between manufacturer and customer, and the strongest counterargument is that somebody in that layer had to define what the products even were before they could be compared.**
1998 Pacer Electronics
Electronic wire, cable and connector distribution.
Part of Anixter's expansion into OEM supply.
- Anixter's own company history: the 1989 Levels programme as the first written performance specification for data cabling systems, and the TIA renaming Levels to Categories; the 1995 Interoperability Lab in Mt. Prospect with UL-verified structured cabling test processes, described as the only such distributor lab; The Blue Book in 1968 at $10M of sales and 700 employees; $1B of sales in 1991; the Itel acquisition and rename to Anixter International
The company's own history, and the Levels-to-Categories claim is its own. It is consistent with the TIA category system's documented origins and with independent accounts of Anixter's cabling standards work, but readers wanting the standards-body side should consult TIA's own record.
- Wikipedia: started in 1956 by brothers Alan and Bill Anixter with a $20,000 loan from their mother; headquarters moved to Skokie in 1969; Alan Anixter's account of carrying a list of acquisitions, with nineteen companies bought by the end of the 1960s; public on the American Stock Exchange in 1967 and expansion to the UK in 1972
Dates the founding to 1956 and the family loan at $20,000, where the company's own history says 1957 and $10,000. Both readings are stated in the entry rather than one being chosen.
- WESCO/Anixter merger news release (SEC Form 425, 13 January 2020): the transaction valued at approximately $4.5B; Anixter's roughly 130,000 customers, nearly 600,000 products, over $1.0B of inventory and 316 warehouse and branch locations across about fifty countries; pro-forma combined 2019 revenues of approximately $17B and over $200M of expected annual run-rate cost synergies by end of year three; the termination of the prior CD&R agreement following its waiver of matching rights
- ChannelE2E: the bidding war beginning with CD&R's $3.8B offer in October 2019 and a forty-day go-shop period, climbing through $3.9B, $4.0B and $4.3B to the final $4.5B
- Encyclopedia.com: incorporation in 1957 as Anixter Brothers Inc.; over 350,000 items from more than 5,000 suppliers to around 95,000 customers as of the mid-2000s; competitors listed as Consolidated Electrical Distributors, Graybar and WESCO - the eventual acquirer