title: Coaxial cable

text: Coaxial cable conducts electrical signal using an inner conductor (usually a solid copper, stranded copper or copper plated steel wire) surrounded by an insulating layer and all enclosed by a shield, typically one to four layers of woven metallic braid and metallic tape. The cable is protected by an outer insulating jacket. Normally, the outside of the shield is kept at ground potential and a signal carrying voltage is applied to the center conductor. When using differential signaling, coaxial cable provides an advantage of equal push-pull currents on the inner conductor and inside of the outer conductor that restrict the signal's electric and magnetic fields to the dielectric, with little leakage outside the shield. Further, electric and magnetic fields outside the cable are largely kept from interfering with signals inside the cable, if unequal currents are filtered out at the receiving end of the line. This property makes coaxial cable a good choice both for carrying weak signals that cannot tolerate interference from the environment, and for stronger electrical signals that must not be allowed to radiate or couple into adjacent structures or circuits. Larger diameter cables and cables with multiple shields have less leakage.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Common applications of coaxial cable include video and CATV distribution, RF and microwave transmission, and computer and instrumentation data connections.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The characteristic impedance of the cable () is determined by the dielectric constant of the inner insulator and the radii of the inner and outer conductors. In radio frequency systems, where the cable length is comparable to the wavelength of the signals transmitted, a uniform cable characteristic impedance is important to minimize loss. The source and load impedances are chosen to match the impedance of the cable to ensure maximum power transfer and minimum standing wave ratio. Other important properties of coaxial cable include attenuation as a function of frequency, voltage handling capability, and shield quality.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Coaxial cable design choices affect physical size, frequency performance, attenuation, power handling capabilities, flexibility, strength, and cost. The inner conductor might be solid or stranded; stranded is more flexible. To get better high-frequency performance, the inner conductor may be silver-plated. Copper-plated steel wire is often used as an inner conductor for cable used in the cable TV industry.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The insulator surrounding the inner conductor may be solid plastic, a foam plastic, or air with spacers supporting the inner wire. The properties of the dielectric insulator determine some of the electrical properties of the cable. A common choice is a solid polyethylene (PE) insulator, used in lower-loss cables. Solid Teflon (PTFE) is also used as an insulator, and exclusively in plenum-rated cables. Some coaxial lines use air (or some other gas) and have spacers to keep the inner conductor from touching the shield.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Many conventional coaxial cables use braided copper wire forming the shield. This allows the cable to be flexible, but it also means there are gaps in the shield layer, and the inner dimension of the shield varies slightly because the braid cannot be flat. Sometimes the braid is silver-plated. For better shield performance, some cables have a double-layer shield. The shield might be just two braids, but it is more common now to have a thin foil shield covered by a wire braid. Some cables may invest in more than two shield layers, such as "quad-shield", which uses four alternating layers of foil and braid. Other shield designs sacrifice flexibility for better performance; some shields are a solid metal tube. Those cables cannot be bent sharply, as the shield will kink, causing losses in the cable. When a foil shield is used a small wire conductor incorporated into the foil makes soldering the shield termination easier.


title: Coaxial cable

text: For high-power radio-frequency transmission up to about 1 GHz, coaxial cable with a solid copper outer conductor is available in sizes of 0.25 inch upward. The outer conductor is corrugated like a bellows to permit flexibility and the inner conductor is held in position by a plastic spiral to approximate an air dielectric. One brand name for such cable is "Heliax".


title: Coaxial cable

text: Coaxial cables require an internal structure of an insulating (dielectric) material to maintain the spacing between the center conductor and shield. The dielectric losses increase in this order: Ideal dielectric (no loss), vacuum, air, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), polyethylene foam, and solid polyethylene. An inhomogeneous dielectric needs to be compensated by a non-circular conductor to avoid current hot-spots.


title: Coaxial cable

text: While many cables have a solid dielectric, many others have a foam dielectric that contains as much air or other gas as possible to reduce the losses by allowing the use of a larger diameter center conductor. Foam coax will have about 15% less attenuation but some types of foam dielectric can absorb moisture—especially at its many surfaces—in humid environments, significantly increasing the loss. Supports shaped like stars or spokes are even better but more expensive and very susceptible to moisture infiltration. Still more expensive were the air-spaced coaxials used for some inter-city communications in the mid-20th century. The center conductor was suspended by polyethylene discs every few centimeters. In some low-loss coaxial cables such as the RG-62 type, the inner conductor is supported by a spiral strand of polyethylene, so that an air space exists between most of the conductor and the inside of the jacket. The lower dielectric constant of air allows for a greater inner diameter at the same impedance and a greater outer diameter at the same cutoff frequency, lowering ohmic losses. Inner conductors are sometimes silver-plated to smooth the surface and reduce losses due to skin effect. A rough surface extends the current path and concentrates the current at peaks, thus increasing ohmic loss.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The insulating jacket can be made from many materials. A common choice is PVC, but some applications may require fire-resistant materials. Outdoor applications may require the jacket to resist ultraviolet light, oxidation, rodent damage, or direct burial. Flooded coaxial cables use a water-blocking gel to protect the cable from water infiltration through minor cuts in the jacket. For internal chassis connections the insulating jacket may be omitted.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Twin-lead transmission lines have the property that the electromagnetic wave propagating down the line extends into the space surrounding the parallel wires. These lines have low loss, but also have undesirable characteristics. They cannot be bent, tightly twisted, or otherwise shaped without changing their characteristic impedance, causing reflection of the signal back toward the source. They also cannot be buried or run along or attached to anything conductive, as the extended fields will induce currents in the nearby conductors causing unwanted radiation and detuning of the line. Standoff insulators are used to keep them away from parallel metal surfaces. Coaxial lines largely solve this problem by confining virtually all of the electromagnetic wave to the area inside the cable. Coaxial lines can therefore be bent and moderately twisted without negative effects, and they can be strapped to conductive supports without inducing unwanted currents in them, so long as provisions are made to ensure differential signalling push-pull currents in the cable.


title: Coaxial cable

text: In radio-frequency applications up to a few gigahertz, the wave propagates primarily in the transverse electric magnetic (TEM) mode, which means that the electric and magnetic fields are both perpendicular to the direction of propagation. However, above a certain cutoff frequency, transverse electric (TE) or transverse magnetic (TM) modes can also propagate, as they do in a hollow waveguide. It is usually undesirable to transmit signals above the cutoff frequency, since it may cause multiple modes with different phase velocities to propagate, interfering with each other. The outer diameter is roughly inversely proportional to the cutoff frequency. A propagating surface-wave mode that only involves the central conductor also exists, but is effectively suppressed in coaxial cable of conventional geometry and common impedance. Electric field lines for this TM mode have a longitudinal component and require line lengths of a half-wavelength or longer.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Coaxial cable may be viewed as a type of waveguide. Power is transmitted through the radial electric field and the circumferential magnetic field in the TEM mode. This is the dominant mode from zero frequency (DC) to an upper limit determined by the electrical dimensions of the cable.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The ends of coaxial cables usually terminate with connectors. Coaxial connectors are designed to maintain a coaxial form across the connection and have the same impedance as the attached cable. Connectors are usually plated with high-conductivity metals such as silver or tarnish-resistant gold. Due to the skin effect, the RF signal is only carried by the plating at higher frequencies and does not penetrate to the connector body. Silver however tarnishes quickly and the silver sulfide that is produced is poorly conductive, degrading connector performance, making silver a poor choice for this application.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Coaxial cable is a particular kind of transmission line, so the circuit models developed for general transmission lines are appropriate. See Telegrapher's equation.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The best coaxial cable impedances in high-power, high-voltage, and low-attenuation applications were experimentally determined at Bell Laboratories in 1929 to be 30, 60, and 77 Ω, respectively. For a coaxial cable with air dielectric and a shield of a given inner diameter, the attenuation is minimized by choosing the diameter of the inner conductor to give a characteristic impedance of 76.7 Ω. When more common dielectrics are considered, the best-loss impedance drops down to a value between 52 and 64 Ω. Maximum power handling is achieved at 30 Ω.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The approximate impedance required to match a centre-fed dipole antenna in free space (i.e., a dipole without ground reflections) is 73 Ω, so 75 Ω coax was commonly used for connecting shortwave antennas to receivers. These typically involve such low levels of RF power that power-handling and high-voltage breakdown characteristics are unimportant when compared to attenuation. Likewise with CATV, although many broadcast TV installations and CATV headends use 300 Ω folded dipole antennas to receive off-the-air signals, 75 Ω coax makes a convenient 4:1 balun transformer for these as well as possessing low attenuation.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The arithmetic mean between 30 Ω and 77 Ω is 53.5 Ω; the geometric mean is 48 Ω. The selection of 50 Ω as a compromise between power-handling capability and attenuation is in general cited as the reason for the number. 50 Ω also works out tolerably well because it corresponds approximately to the feedpoint impedance of a half-wave dipole, mounted approximately a half-wave above "normal" ground (ideally 73 Ω, but reduced for low-hanging horizontal wires).


title: Coaxial cable

text: RG-62 is a 93 Ω coaxial cable originally used in mainframe computer networks in the 1970s and early 1980s (it was the cable used to connect IBM 3270 terminals to IBM 3274/3174 terminal cluster controllers). Later, some manufacturers of LAN equipment, such as Datapoint for ARCNET, adopted RG-62 as their coaxial cable standard. The cable has the lowest capacitance per unit-length when compared to other coaxial cables of similar size.


title: Coaxial cable

text: All of the components of a coaxial system should have the same impedance to avoid internal reflections at connections between components (see Impedance matching). Such reflections may cause signal attenuation. They introduce standing waves, which increase losses and can even result in cable dielectric breakdown with high-power transmission. In analog video or TV systems, reflections cause ghosting in the image; multiple reflections may cause the original signal to be followed by more than one echo. If a coaxial cable is open (not connected at the end), the termination has nearly infinite resistance, which causes reflections. If the coaxial cable is short-circuited, the termination resistance is nearly zero, which causes reflections with the opposite polarity. Reflections will be nearly eliminated if the coaxial cable is terminated in a pure resistance equal to its impedance.


title: Coaxial cable

text: One should also know the inductance and capacitance of the two concentric cylindrical conductors which is the coaxial cable. By definition formula_24 and getting the electric field by the formula of electric field of an infinite line,


title: Coaxial cable

text: where formula_26 is charge,formula_27 is the permittivity of free space, formula_28 is the radial distance and formula_29 is the unit vector in the direction away from the axis. The voltage, V, is


title: Coaxial cable

text: where formula_3 is the inner diameter of the outer conductor and formula_2 is the diameter of the inner conductor. The capacitance can then be solved by substitution,


title: Coaxial cable

text: and the inductance is taken from Ampere's Law for two concentric conductors (coaxial wire) and with the definition of inductance,


title: Coaxial cable

text: where formula_36 is magnetic induction, formula_37 is the permeability of free space, formula_38 is the magnetic flux and formula_39 is the differential surface. Taking the inductance per meter,


title: Coaxial cable

text: Substituting the derived capacitance and inductance, and generalizing them to the case where a dielectric of permeability formula_9 and permittivity formula_4 is used in between the inner and outer conductors,


title: Coaxial cable

text: Signal leakage is the passage of electromagnetic fields through the shield of a cable and occurs in both directions. Ingress is the passage of an outside signal into the cable and can result in noise and disruption of the desired signal. Egress is the passage of signal intended to remain within the cable into the outside world and can result in a weaker signal at the end of the cable and radio frequency interference to nearby devices. Severe leakage usually results from improperly installed connectors or faults in the cable shield.


title: Coaxial cable

text: For example, in the United States, signal leakage from cable television systems is regulated by the FCC, since cable signals use the same frequencies as aeronautical and radionavigation bands. CATV operators may also choose to monitor their networks for leakage to prevent ingress. Outside signals entering the cable can cause unwanted noise and picture ghosting. Excessive noise can overwhelm the signal, making it useless. In-channel ingress can be digitally removed by ingress cancellation.


title: Coaxial cable

text: An ideal shield would be a perfect conductor with no holes, gaps, or bumps connected to a perfect ground. However, a smooth solid highly conductive shield would be heavy, inflexible, and expensive. Such coax is used for straight-line feeds to commercial radio broadcast towers. More economical cables must make compromises between shield efficacy, flexibility, and cost, such as the corrugated surface of flexible hardline, flexible braid, or foil shields. Since shields cannot be perfect conductors, current flowing on the inside of the shield produces an electromagnetic field on the outer surface of the shield.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Consider the skin effect. The magnitude of an alternating current in a conductor decays exponentially with distance beneath the surface, with the depth of penetration being proportional to the square root of the resistivity. This means that, in a shield of finite thickness, some small amount of current will still be flowing on the opposite surface of the conductor. With a perfect conductor (i.e., zero resistivity), all of the current would flow at the surface, with no penetration into and through the conductor. Real cables have a shield made of an imperfect, although usually very good, conductor, so there must always be some leakage.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The gaps or holes, allow some of the electromagnetic field to penetrate to the other side. For example, braided shields have many small gaps. The gaps are smaller when using a foil (solid metal) shield, but there is still a seam running the length of the cable. Foil becomes increasingly rigid with increasing thickness, so a thin foil layer is often surrounded by a layer of braided metal, which offers greater flexibility for a given cross-section.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Signal leakage can be severe if there is poor contact at the interface to connectors at either end of the cable or if there is a break in the shield.


title: Coaxial cable

text: To greatly reduce signal leakage into or out of the cable, by a factor of 1000, or even 10,000, superscreened cables are often used in critical applications, such as for neutron flux counters in nuclear reactors.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Superscreened cables for nuclear use are defined in IEC 96-4-1, 1990, however as there have been long gaps in the construction of nuclear power stations in Europe, many existing installations are using superscreened cables to the UK standard AESS(TRG) 71181 which is referenced in IEC 61917.


title: Coaxial cable

text: A continuous current, even if small, along the imperfect shield of a coaxial cable can cause visible or audible interference. In CATV systems distributing analog signals the potential difference between the coaxial network and the electrical grounding system of a house can cause a visible "hum bar" in the picture. This appears as a wide horizontal distortion bar in the picture that scrolls slowly upward. Such differences in potential can be reduced by proper bonding to a common ground at the house. See ground loop.


title: Coaxial cable

text: External fields create a voltage across the inductance of the outside of the outer conductor between sender and receiver. The effect is less when there are several parallel cables, as this reduces the inductance and, therefore, the voltage. Because the outer conductor carries the reference potential for the signal on the inner conductor, the receiving circuit measures the wrong voltage.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The transformer effect is sometimes used to mitigate the effect of currents induced in the shield. The inner and outer conductors form the primary and secondary winding of the transformer, and the effect is enhanced in some high-quality cables that have an outer layer of mu-metal. Because of this 1:1 transformer, the aforementioned voltage across the outer conductor is transformed onto the inner conductor so that the two voltages can be cancelled by the receiver. Many senders and receivers have means to reduce the leakage even further. They increase the transformer effect by passing the whole cable through a ferrite core one or more times.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Common mode current occurs when stray currents in the shield flow in the same direction as the current in the center conductor, causing the coax to radiate. They are the opposite of the desired "push-pull" differential signalling currents, where the signal currents on the inner and outer conductor are equal and opposite.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Most of the shield effect in coax results from opposing currents in the center conductor and shield creating opposite magnetic fields that cancel, and thus do not radiate. The same effect helps ladder line. However, ladder line is extremely sensitive to surrounding metal objects, which can enter the fields before they completely cancel. Coax does not have this problem, since the field is enclosed in the shield. However, it is still possible for a field to form between the shield and other connected objects, such as the antenna the coax feeds. The current formed by the field between the antenna and the coax shield would flow in the same direction as the current in the center conductor, and thus not be canceled. Energy would radiate from the coax itself, affecting the radiation pattern of the antenna. With sufficient power, this could be a hazard to people near the cable. A properly placed and properly sized balun can prevent common-mode radiation in coax. An isolating transformer or blocking capacitor can be used to couple a coaxial cable to equipment, where it is desirable to pass radio-frequency signals but to block direct current or low-frequency power.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Most coaxial cables have a characteristic impedance of either 50, 52, 75, or 93 Ω. The RF industry uses standard type-names for coaxial cables. Thanks to television, RG-6 is the most commonly used coaxial cable for home use, and the majority of connections outside Europe are by F connectors.


title: Coaxial cable

text: A series of standard types of coaxial cable were specified for military uses, in the form "RG-#" or "RG-#/U". They date from World War II and were listed in "MIL-HDBK-216" published in 1962. These designations are now obsolete. The RG designation stands for Radio Guide; the U designation stands for Universal. The current military standard is MIL-SPEC MIL-C-17. MIL-C-17 numbers, such as "M17/75-RG214", are given for military cables and manufacturer's catalog numbers for civilian applications. However, the RG-series designations were so common for generations that they are still used, although critical users should be aware that since the handbook is withdrawn there is no standard to guarantee the electrical and physical characteristics of a cable described as "RG-# type". The RG designators are mostly used to identify compatible connectors that fit the inner conductor, dielectric, and jacket dimensions of the old RG-series cables.


title: Coaxial cable

text: There are also other designation schemes for coaxial cables such as the URM, CT, BT, RA, PSF and WF series.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Short coaxial cables are commonly used to connect home video equipment, in ham radio setups, and in NIM. While formerly common for implementing computer networks, in particular Ethernet ("thick" 10BASE5 and "thin" 10BASE2), twisted pair cables have replaced them in most applications except in the growing consumer cable modem market for broadband Internet access.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Long distance coaxial cable was used in the 20th century to connect radio networks, television networks, and Long Distance telephone networks though this has largely been superseded by later methods (fibre optics, T1/E1, satellite).


title: Coaxial cable

text: Shorter coaxials still carry cable television signals to the majority of television receivers, and this purpose consumes the majority of coaxial cable production. In 1980s and early 1990s coaxial cable was also used in computer networking, most prominently in Ethernet networks, where it was later in late 1990s to early 2000s replaced by UTP cables in North America and STP cables in Western Europe, both with 8P8C modular connectors.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Micro coaxial cables are used in a range of consumer devices, military equipment, and also in ultra-sound scanning equipment.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The most common impedances that are widely used are 50 or 52 ohms, and 75 ohms, although other impedances are available for specific applications. The 50 / 52 ohm cables are widely used for industrial and commercial two-way radio frequency applications (including radio, and telecommunications), although 75 ohms is commonly used for broadcast television and radio.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Coax cable is often used to carry data/signals from an antenna to a receiver—from a satellite dish to a satellite receiver, from a television antenna to a television receiver, from a radio mast to a radio receiver, etc.


title: Coaxial cable

text: In many cases, the same single coax cable carries power in the opposite direction, to the antenna, to power the low-noise amplifier.


title: Coaxial cable

text: In some cases a single coax cable carries (unidirectional) power and bidirectional data/signals, as in DiSEqC.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Hard line is used in broadcasting as well as many other forms of radio communication. It is a coaxial cable constructed using round copper, silver or gold tubing or a combination of such metals as a shield. Some lower-quality hard line may use aluminum shielding. Aluminum, however, is easily oxidized and unlike silver oxide, aluminum oxide drastically loses effective conductivity. Therefore, all connections must be air and water tight. The center conductor may consist of solid copper, or copper-plated aluminum. Since skin effect is an issue with RF, copper plating provides sufficient surface for an effective conductor. Most varieties of hardline used for external chassis or when exposed to the elements have a PVC jacket; however, some internal applications may omit the insulation jacket. Hard line can be very thick, typically at least a half inch or 13 mm and up to several times that, and has low loss even at high power. These large-scale hard lines are almost always used in the connection between a transmitter on the ground and the antenna or aerial on a tower. Hard line may also be known by trademarked names such as Heliax (CommScope), or Cablewave (RFS/Cablewave). Larger varieties of hardline may have a center conductor that is constructed from either rigid or corrugated copper tubing. The dielectric in hard line may consist of polyethylene foam, air, or a pressurized gas such as nitrogen or desiccated air (dried air). In gas-charged lines, hard plastics such as nylon are used as spacers to separate the inner and outer conductors. The addition of these gases into the dielectric space reduces moisture contamination, provides a stable dielectric constant, and provides a reduced risk of internal arcing. Gas-filled hardlines are usually used on high-power RF transmitters such as television or radio broadcasting, military transmitters, and high-power amateur radio applications but may also be used on some critical lower-power applications such as those in the microwave bands. However, in the microwave region, "waveguide" is more often used than hard line for transmitter-to-antenna, or antenna-to-receiver applications. The various shields used in hard line also differ; some forms use rigid tubing, or pipe, while others may use a corrugated tubing, which makes bending easier, as well as reduces kinking when the cable is bent to conform. Smaller varieties of hard line may be used internally in some high-frequency applications, in particular in equipment within the microwave range, to reduce interference between stages of the device.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Radiating or leaky cable is another form of coaxial cable which is constructed in a similar fashion to hard line, however it is constructed with tuned slots cut into the shield. These slots are tuned to the specific RF wavelength of operation or tuned to a specific radio frequency band. This type of cable is to provide a tuned bi-directional "desired" leakage effect between transmitter and receiver. It is often used in elevator shafts, US Navy Ships, underground transportation tunnels and in other areas where an antenna is not feasible. One example of this type of cable is Radiax (CommScope).


title: Coaxial cable

text: RG-6 is available in four different types designed for various applications. In addition, the core may be copper clad steel (CCS) or bare solid copper (BC). "Plain" or "house" RG-6 is designed for indoor or external house wiring. "Flooded" cable is infused with waterblocking gel for use in underground conduit or direct burial. "Messenger" may contain some waterproofing but is distinguished by the addition of a steel messenger wire along its length to carry the tension involved in an aerial drop from a utility pole. "Plenum" cabling is expensive and comes with a special Teflon-based outer jacket designed for use in ventilation ducts to meet fire codes. It was developed since the plastics used as the outer jacket and inner insulation in many "Plain" or "house" cabling gives off poisonous gas when burned.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Triaxial cable or triax is coaxial cable with a third layer of shielding, insulation and sheathing. The outer shield, which is earthed (grounded), protects the inner shield from electromagnetic interference from outside sources.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Twin-axial cable or twinax is a balanced, twisted pair within a cylindrical shield. It allows a nearly perfect differential signalling which is "both" shielded "and" balanced to pass through. Multi-conductor coaxial cable is also sometimes used.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Semi-rigid cable is a coaxial form using a solid copper outer sheath. This type of coax offers superior screening compared to cables with a braided outer conductor, especially at higher frequencies. The major disadvantage is that the cable, as its name implies, is not very flexible, and is not intended to be flexed after initial forming. (See )


title: Coaxial cable

text: Conformable cable is a flexible reformable alternative to semi-rigid coaxial cable used where flexibility is required. Conformable cable can be stripped and formed by hand without the need for specialized tools, similar to standard coaxial cable.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Rigid line is a coaxial line formed by two copper tubes maintained concentric every other meter using PTFE-supports. Rigid lines cannot be bent, so they often need elbows. Interconnection with rigid line is done with an inner bullet/inner support and a flange or connection kit. Typically, rigid lines are connected using standardised EIA RF Connectors whose bullet and flange sizes match the standard line diameters. For each outer diameter, either 75 or 50 ohm inner tubes can be obtained.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Rigid line is commonly used indoors for interconnection between high-power transmitters and other RF-components, but more rugged rigid line with weatherproof flanges is used outdoors on antenna masts, etc. In the interests of saving weight and costs, on masts and similar structures the outer line is often aluminium, and special care must be taken to prevent corrosion.


title: Coaxial cable

text: With a flange connector, it is also possible to go from rigid line to hard line. Many broadcasting antennas and antenna splitters use the flanged rigid line interface even when connecting to flexible coaxial cables and hard line.


title: Coaxial cable

text: At the start of analog satellite TV broadcasts in the UK by Sky, a 75 ohm cable referred to as "RG6" was used. This cable had a 1 mm copper core, air-spaced polyethylene dielectric and copper braid on an aluminum foil shield. When installed outdoors without protection, the cable was affected by UV radiation, which cracked the PVC outer sheath and allowed moisture ingress. The combination of copper, aluminum, moisture and air caused rapid corrosion, sometimes resulting in a 'snake swallowed an egg' appearance. Consequently, despite the higher cost, the RG6 cable was dropped in favor of CT100 when Sky launched its digital broadcasts.


title: Coaxial cable

text: From around 1999 to 2005 (when CT100 manufacturer Raydex went out of business), CT100 remained the 75 ohm cable of choice for satellite TV and especially Sky. It had an air-spaced polyethylene dielectric, a 1 mm solid copper core and copper braid on copper foil shield. CT63 was a thinner cable in 'shotgun' style, meaning that it was two cables molded together and was used mainly by Sky for the twin connection required by the "Sky+" satellite TV receiver, which incorporated a hard drive recording system and a second, independent tuner.


title: Coaxial cable

text: In 2005, these cables were replaced by WF100 and WF65, respectively, manufactured by Webro and having a similar construction but a foam dielectric that provided the same electrical performance as air-spaced but was more robust and less likely to be crushed.


title: Coaxial cable

text: At the same time, with the price of copper steadily rising, the original RG6 was dropped in favor of a construction that used a copper-clad steel core and aluminum braid on aluminum foil. Its lower price made it attractive to aerial installers looking for a replacement for the so-called "low-loss" cable traditionally used for UK terrestrial aerial installations. This cable had been manufactured with a decreasing number of strands of braid, as the price of copper increased, such that the shielding performance of cheaper brands had fallen to as low as 40 percent. With the advent of digital terrestrial transmissions in the UK, this low-loss cable was no longer suitable.


title: Coaxial cable

text: The new RG6 still performed well at high frequencies because of the skin effect in the copper cladding. However, the aluminum shield had a high DC resistance and the steel core an even higher one. The result is that this type of cable could not reliably be used in satellite TV installations, where it was required to carry a significant amount of current, because the voltage drop affected the operation of the low noise block downconverter (LNB) on the dish.


title: Coaxial cable

text: A problem with all the aforementioned cables, when passing current, is that electrolytic corrosion can occur in the connections unless moisture and air are excluded. Consequently, various solutions to exclude moisture have been proposed. The first was to seal the connection by wrapping it with self-amalgamating rubberized tape, which bonds to itself when activated by stretching. The second proposal, by the American Channel Master company (now owned by Andrews corp.) at least as early as 1999, was to apply silicone grease to the wires making connection. The third proposal was to fit a self-sealing plug to the cable. All of these methods are reasonably successful if implemented correctly.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Coaxial cable insulation may degrade, requiring replacement of the cable, especially if it has been exposed to the elements on a continuous basis. The shield is normally grounded, and if even a single thread of the braid or filament of foil touches the center conductor, the signal will be shorted causing significant or total signal loss. This most often occurs at improperly installed end connectors and splices. Also, the connector or splice must be properly attached to the shield, as this provides the path to ground for the interfering signal.


title: Coaxial cable

text: Despite being shielded, interference can occur on coaxial cable lines. Susceptibility to interference has little relationship to broad cable type designations (e.g. RG-59, RG-6) but is strongly related to the composition and configuration of the cable's shielding. For cable television, with frequencies extending well into the UHF range, a foil shield is normally provided, and will provide total coverage as well as high effectiveness against high-frequency interference. Foil shielding is ordinarily accompanied by a tinned copper or aluminum braid shield, with anywhere from 60 to 95% coverage. The braid is important to shield effectiveness because (1) it is more effective than foil at preventing low-frequency interference, (2) it provides higher conductivity to ground than foil, and (3) it makes attaching a connector easier and more reliable. "Quad-shield" cable, using two low-coverage aluminum braid shields and two layers of foil, is often used in situations involving troublesome interference, but is less effective than a single layer of foil and single high-coverage copper braid shield such as is found on broadcast-quality precision video cable.


title: Coaxial cable

text: In the United States and some other countries, cable television distribution systems use extensive networks of outdoor coaxial cable, often with in-line distribution amplifiers. Leakage of signals into and out of cable TV systems can cause interference to cable subscribers and to over-the-air radio services using the same frequencies as those of the cable system.


title: The Marble Index

text: The Marble Index is the second studio album by the German musician Nico, released in November 1968 on Elektra Records. The avant-garde sound introduced in the album—a stark contrast with her folk pop debut, "Chelsea Girl" (1967)—was the result of the combination of Nico's droning harmonium and somber vocals, and the producer John Cale's musical arrangements, which were inspired by modern European classical music. Nico envisioned the release as an attempt to get artistic legitimacy and changing the looks that had made her famous as a fashion model.


title: The Marble Index

text: Although "The Marble Index" was largely unnoticed when it was released, it has achieved acclaim over time. Nico's unprecedented sound and personal style—both recognised for their tenebrous quality—are considered an influence on several artists. Most notably, they served as a musical and visual prototype for the 1980's gothic rock scene. Nico and Cale continued working together, releasing two more studio albums in the same vein—"Desertshore" (1970) and "The End..." (1974)—which are now considered parts of a trilogy.


title: The Marble Index

text: Nico had made her recording debut in 1965 with the single "I'm Not Sayin'". At Andy Warhol's suggestion, she joined the Velvet Underground as a chanteuse, and sang three tracks on their 1967 album "The Velvet Underground & Nico". Nico and the group were regulars at the Factory. However, Lou Reed was reluctant to include her in the band. This, coupled with her desire to be a soloist, made Nico leave the group as casually as she had joined. The band members continued to accompany her as she performed on her own and played on her 1967 solo debut, "Chelsea Girl". The folk-pop album included songs by Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin, and Jackson Browne (with whom Nico had a brief affair).


title: The Marble Index

text: The American singer Jim Morrison, whom Nico later called her "soul brother", encouraged her to write her own songs; this was "a key breakthrough" for her. They were together in California in July and August 1967, often driving into the desert and experimenting with peyote. Morrison, who encouraged Nico to write down her dreams, read the writings of Mary Shelley, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to her. He recorded his chemical visions and dreams, using the material for his songs as he imagined the opium-addicted Coleridge had worked. In 1986 Nico said, "He taught me to write songs. I never thought that I could ... He really inspired me a lot. It was like looking in a mirror then." She began writing material and performing it to an intimate audience at Steve Paul's club, the Scene. Nico composed her music on a harmonium bought, according to Richard Witts, from a San Francisco hippie. Her manager, Danny Fields, said that she may have acquired it through the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. The harmonium became her trademark with which "she discovered not only her own artistic voice but a whole new realm of sound".


title: The Marble Index

text: "The Marble Index" was produced during a little-studied period of Nico's life. For "The Quietus"s Matthew Lindsay, "the liminal drift of these years only emphasizes the music's amorphous moorings and lack of precedent." Nico approached Danny Fields in mid-1968 with the desire to make an album and prove herself artistically. Resentful of her beauty, she radically changed her image – dyeing her hair red and wearing black clothes in an effort to distance herself from what had made her a popular fashion model. Cale said, "She hated the idea of being blonde and beautiful, and in some ways she hated being a woman, because she figured all her beauty had brought her was grief ... So "The Marble Index" was an opportunity for her to prove she was a serious artist, not just this kind of blonde bombshell."


title: The Marble Index

text: Nico already had the title for the album in mind from "The Prelude", William Wordsworth's magnum opus. William contemplates a statue of Isaac Newton in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge "with his prism and silent face / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." Asked about the significance of this Wordsworth quote, Nico replied: "I sometimes find a little of my own poetry in other poets, yes. Incidentally, or accidentally."


title: The Marble Index

text: Fields relayed Nico's request to Jac Holzman, head of Elektra Records; she then went to Holzman's Broadway office with her harmonium and performed for him. Despite the challenging nature of Nico's music, Holzman agreed to release her album and assigned Frazier Mohawk to produce it, despite Nico and John Cale's desire to work together. He gave her a budget of $10,000 (), with a four-day recording schedule at a studio on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Fields contacted Cale, who was the album's "de facto" producer after Mohawk gave him free rein. According to Mohawk, he spent most of the sessions using heroin with Nico. Her drug use is cited as influencing the album's sound; Simon Reynolds wrote, "While it may be a reductive interpretation to regard "The Marble Index" as the ultimate heroin album, its hunger for narcosis, its frigid expanses, recalls William Burroughs's description of the junkie's quest for a metabolic 'Absolute Zero'."


title: The Marble Index

text: During the sessions, Nico and Cale "fought at every opportunity"; Nico was "in pain" while recording. Nico and Cale worked on one song at a time, mixing the album as they went, with her voice and harmonium the starting points for each track. Cale said about the recording process:


title: The Marble Index

text: The harmonium was out of tune with everything. It wasn't even in tune with itself. She insisted on playing it on everything so we had to figure out ways to separate her voice from it as much as possible and then find instrumental voices that would be compatible with the harmonium track ... As an arranger you're usually trying to take the songs and put a structure on them, but what I thought was valuable was when you took the centre out of the track and worked around the central core of the tonality and changes. That left you with a sort of floating free-form tapestry behind what she was doing, which is when things became more abstract.


title: The Marble Index

text: He also said, "I was pretty much left alone for two days, and I let [Nico] in at the end. I played her [the album] song by song, and she'd burst into tears. 'Oh! It's so beautiful!', 'Oh, it's so beautiful!' You know, this is the same stuff that people tell me, 'Oh! It's so suicidal!'" The original release of "The Marble Index" included eight of 12 songs Nico recorded. "Roses in the Snow", "Nibelungen", "Sagen die Gelehrten" and "Reve Reveiller" were left off the album. The finished album was barely 30 minutes long, which "was as much apparently as Frazier Mohawk, mixing and sequencing it, could stand without starting to feel suicidal".


title: The Marble Index

text: "The Marble Index" avant-garde style distanced Nico from rock and pop. When an interviewer pointed out the contrast with "Chelsea Girl", Nico said that and "The Marble Index" was ""not" supposed to be noise, because most pop music to me is noise, alright?" According to Cale, the album "makes more sense in terms of advancing the modern European classical tradition than it does as folk or rock music". With Nico's compositions based around one or two chords, Cale decided to avoid drone and raga (Eastern music common on the West Coast at the time) in favor of a European classical approach in his arrangements. The music has been compared with Germanic folk music, Gregorian chant, medieval music such as madrigals, European avant-garde, Romanticism, and the music of Richard Wagner.


title: The Marble Index

text: Peter Buckley noted Nico's use of psychedelic drugs during the Summer of Love as an influence on the album's music, and Jim DeRogatis described it as "minimalist bad-trip psychedelia". "Frieze" called "The Marble Index" the "bridge between the New York Minimalists of the late 1960s and Brian Eno's ambient records of the late 1970s". The critic Simon Reynolds identified the album as "the rock precedent for isolationism", a term coined by the critic Kevin Martin to describe "a loose network of disenchanted refugees from rock and experimental musicians" that originated the genre known as dark ambient. Isolationism, Reynolds writes, "breaks with all of ambient's feel-good premises" and "evokes an uneasy silence: the uncanny calm before catastrophe, the deathly quiet of aftermath". He listed Aphex Twin (particularly his 1994 album "Selected Ambient Works Volume II"), Seefeel, David Toop and Max Eastley, among others, as exponents of this style.


title: The Marble Index

text: According to "Uncut", "The Marble Index" is "one of that rare breed of recordings which, the better part of four decades later, still has no adequate comparison, existing in a genre all its own". The album is considered a proto-goth record. André Escarameia felt the album "anticipated gothic rock by more than a decade due to [its] ethereally darker [ambience] and disturbing sonority." Its soundscape has been described as "bleak", "chilly", "harrowing", and "everything from the sound of someone rapping on a coffin lid to that of being buried alive". In her 1969 "Rolling Stone" review, Anne Marie Micklo described it as "mood music, with an obscure and elusive text recited over it". Regarding the record's sonority, British author Simon Goddard wrote, "it was on ["The Marble Index"] that the real sound of Nico was unleashed: a bleak pumping misery which would define her music for the last two decades of her life." Lenny Kaye of "Wondering Sound" described the album as "Circe-like".


title: The Marble Index

text: Nico's lyrics have been described as "mythological and surrealist". According to "Spin", "for lyrical inspiration, Nico looked to the Romantic poets and peyote, passions shared with Jim Morrison." Stephen Davis wrote that the album's lyrics stem from the collaboration between Nico and Morrison, and his influence can be seen in song titles such as "Lawn of Dawns", "Frozen Warnings" and "Evening of Light". Morrison offered Nico a model for her writings by showing her how he worked on his poems, indicated by her use of internal rhymes. According to Peter Hogan, some of her lyrics "show a marked debt to Sylvia Plath and to William Blake" and a search for artistic legitimacy. Other critics have found Nico's lyrics to be intriguing. For example, Richie Unterberger wrote: "Nico intones lyrics that don't quite express specific feelings but convey a state of uneasy restlessness." They have also been described as "stark [and] symbolist" and "metaphysical".


title: The Marble Index

text: The album begins with a gentle piano-and-glockenspiel instrumental before segueing into "Lawn of Dawns", which introduces Nico's harmonium "of undulating motion weaving against her voice". The song is engulfed in "weird clattering and tintinnabulating", while a "dark twangy guitar ... stumbles to a subdued halt in [its] final seconds". It features what may be Nico's first lyrics, inspired by her peyote visions with Jim Morrison: "He blesses you, he blesses me/The day the night caresses,/Caresses you, caresses me,/Can you follow me?/I cannot understand the way I feel/Until I rest on lawns of dawns—/Can you follow me?" Nico explained the peyote-induced experience which inspired the lyrics: "The light of the dawn was a very deep green and I believed I was upside down and the sky was the desert which had become a garden and then the ocean. I do not swim and I was frightened when it was water and more resolved when it was land. I felt embraced by the sky-garden." The lyrics of the next song, "No One Is There", have been described as "in all probability influenced by Jim Morrison" ("Some are calling/Some are sad/Some are calling mad") and are sung over Cale's classical quartet of violas darting in and out of her unusual vocal tempo. "Ari's Song" was dedicated to Nico's young son, Christian Aaron "Ari" Boulogne, her only child with French actor Alain Delon, and has been called "the least-comforting lullaby ever recorded". It begins with the harmonium's clipped, whistling tones as she sings softly, "Sail away/Sail away my little boy". "Facing the Wind" is supported by "Cale-banged piano clusters, scraping of percussion or walls and off-beat tympani"; Nico's voice sounds filtered (possibly through a Leslie speaker), with the "somnambulistic toiling" of her pipe organ accompanied by viola and strident piano.


title: The Marble Index

text: Side two opens with "Julius Caesar (Memento Hodié)", which lyrically explores myths and gods. It features Nico's low, droning harmonium accompanied by Cale's viola. On "Frozen Warnings", Cale's arrangement harmonically blends with the pipe organ. It is considered Nico's signature song from her collaboration with Cale; Nina Antonia wrote: "Of all the strange and wracked numbers on the record, 'Frozen Warnings' is quintessential Nico; lyrics that convey a sorrowful atmosphere and little comfort in the melody." The album's dreamlike quality end with its last song, "Evening of Light", which has been described as "frighteningly quiet and hypnotizing". Nico sings "Midnight winds are landing at the end of time", with harpsichord and Cale's staccato viola building until the latter gains ground and sways with the tympani's "roar and clatter". The 1991 reissue of "The Marble Index" also includes the outtakes "Roses in the Snow" and "Nibelungen". In the latter, Nico's vocals are unaccompanied. The full version (with instrumental accompaniment) was included in the 2007 compilation "The Frozen Borderline – 1968–1970"; according to Dave Thompson of AllMusic, "It rises to equal any of Nico's subsequent performances or compositions."


title: The Marble Index

text: Holzman said "there was no question" of not releasing "The Marble Index" despite its lack of commercial appeal. He saw it as a work of art, rather than a product. It was released in November 1968 with little promotion. A music video for "Evening of Light", featuring Iggy Pop and the other Stooges, was shot by the art collector François de Menil in 1969. He described the clip as "a sort of pre-MTV promotional item for ["The Marble Index"]. An early pop promo." De Menil was interested in shooting a short film with Nico, and she agreed with the condition that they would film it in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Pop's hometown, and that he would be featured in it. Dave Thompson described the clip as follows: "It was shot in a cornfield behind [Pop's house], barren and stubbly in the late winter chill, Nico in white and windswept, Pop in whiteface, manic and agitated, caressing and crushing the mannequin parts that littered the field, while a wooden cross is raised before them and set ablaze as night falls." Elektra Records—who had not agreed to finance the project—rejected the music video, as did "any other media outlets that de Menil approached".


title: The Marble Index

text: "The Marble Index" "failed to challenge the supremacy of "Nashville Skyline", "From Elvis in Memphis", "Abbey Road" and "Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations" on the album charts of 1969". Although Holzman was pleased with the album, Nico's longevity with the label was unlikely; he was increasingly concerned with her heroin use and she had a difficult, irresponsible attitude. Nico left the United States before she was officially released from Elektra, after a violent incident in a New York City bar. Biographers refer to her leaving the U.S. as an exile; Nico said, "When you live in a dangerous place, you also become increasingly dangerous. You might just wind up in jail."


title: The Marble Index

text: In London, Nico recorded two more albums with Cale in the same vein: "Desertshore" (1970) and "The End..." (1974), now considered parts of a trilogy. The album was reissued as a CD in 1991 with two bonus tracks. Songs from "The Marble Index" have been included in Nico compilations including "The Classic Years" (1998), "Femme Fatale" (2002), and "The Frozen Borderline – 1968–1970" (2007). For Elektra's 60th anniversary, "Frozen Warnings" was released as a single on October 25, 2010, with "No One Is There" as its B-side.


title: The Marble Index

text: Although "The Marble Index" was generally unnoticed when it was released, it was praised by the countercultural "East Village Other" and "International Times"; however, most critics found "her desolate soundscapes inaccessible." Anne Marie Micklo of "Rolling Stone" gave the album a positive review, calling side two "a really worthwhile venture into musical infinity". A cult following emerged around it, which included music journalist Lester Bangs, who wrote in a 1978 article entitled "Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico": ""The Marble Index" is the greatest piece of 'avant-garde classical', 'serious' music of the last half of the 20th century so far." Although Bangs praised the album, he also wrote that it "scared the shit out of [him]" and described the listening experience as "self-torture".


title: The Marble Index

text: The album's rise to acclaim was slow; for the most part, audiences have remained nonplussed. According to Simon Goddard, most critics regard it as "[Nico's] defining avant-garde masterpiece". "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" considers "The Marble Index" the point in Nico's discography where "the difficult listening starts", and the album is "pretty amazing for it". Anthony Carew of About.com called it "a suite of rootless songs written with little precedent" and "an astonishing haunting, the work of a woman who, even whilst alive, seemed a lot like a ghost". Anthony Thornton of "NME" called it an "artistic triumph": "Bleak but beautiful, this album remains the most fitting embodiment of her doomed glamour." According to "Spin", "Few records, before or since, have sounded lonelier, spookier, or more desolate". "Trouser Press" described it as "one of the scariest records ever made".


title: The Marble Index

text: AllMusic's Richie Unterberger awarded the album three stars out of five, describing Nico's songwriting as "singularly morose". Dorian Lynskey wrote for "The Guardian" that "The Marble Index" forces the distinction between art and entertainment, comparing it to the "terrifying" output of musician Scott Walker (particularly the album "Tilt"), painter Mark Rothko and writer Philip Roth. Simon Reynolds described the record as "psychic landscapes, glittering in their immaculate, lifeless majesty of someone cut off from the thawing warmth of human contact and fellowship" and "religious music for nihilists". Sputnikmusic's Louis Arp was less enthusiastic, finding the music "pretentious" and "agitating" in the aura it evoked while deeming Nico's lyrics repetitive and meaningless. "Village Voice" critic Robert Christgau said, "While "The Velvet Underground and Nico" plus "Chelsea Girl" convinced me that Nico had charisma; "The Marble Index" plus "Desertshore" convince me that she's a fool."


title: The Marble Index

text: "The Marble Index" has a sound which distinguishes it from the musical landscape of the 1960s. Anthony Thornton of "NME" called it "a stark, oppressive opus that has influenced everyone from PJ Harvey to the Duke Spirit. According to "Spin", "["The Marble Index"] set the tone for decades of music to come – Arthur Russell, Dead Can Dance, Fennesz, Zola Jesus, Grouper, pretty much every metal band that ever used a harpsichord – but few followers have sailed so near to the edge of the abyss with such chillingly beautiful results." The Canadian rock band The Marble Index is named after Nico's album.


title: The Marble Index

text: Simon Reynolds wrote about a female rocker he called the Ice Queen: "Ice is the opposite of all that women are supposed to be: warm, flowing, giving, receptive. Like Lady Macbeth, the Ice Queen has unsexed herself, dammed up her lachrymal and lactation ducts. She offers cold, not comfort. Her hard surfaces can't be penetrated. She is an island, an iceberg." In "The Marble Index" Nico took this persona (originally embodied by Grace Slick) even further, making a fetish of disconnection and "[dreaming] of a sort of negative nirvana". According to "Dazed", this persona has influenced Siouxsie Sioux, Zola Jesus, and Björk. The latter's 2011 album, "Biophilia", was described by "Rolling Stone" as "The Marble Index"s "haunted digital sister". The influence of "The Marble Index" can also be found in the music of Laurel Halo.


title: The Marble Index

text: "Frozen Warnings" was included in Toby Creswell's compendium "1001 Songs"; Creswell wrote, "Just as she had done with "The Velvet Underground & Nico", the singer put a new tone into music." In 2013 John Cale curated "Life Along the Borderline: A Tribute to Nico" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which featured songs from "The Marble Index" and other Nico albums performed by Peaches, Yeasayer, Sharon Van Etten, Meshell Ndegeocello and Cale. Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie has listed "The Marble Index" as one of his favorite albums and stated that it was a "huge influence" in the making of their 1991 album "Screamadelica". Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, has cited the album as an inspiration, writing, "it completely changed my entire view of what it was possible to do in music", and "you could never mistake it for anything else, which is an astounding thing to be able to do." The album was also a favorite of American musician Elliott Smith.


title: The Marble Index

text: "The Marble Index", which influenced the gothic rock of the late 1970s and early 1980s, has been called "the first goth album". Ian Astbury of the Cult and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus have cited Nico as an influence. She lived in the United Kingdom when the gothic rock scene was developing, with supporting acts including the Sisters of Mercy and Gene Loves Jezebel. According to Murphy, "Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else's Hammer horror-film gothic. They both did "Frankenstein", but Nico's was real." David Dalton of "Gadfly Online" disagreed: "Some say she is the originator of Goth, but this is just silly, a misunderstanding, a pastiche. Nico has no heirs. She is a discrete entity."


title: The Marble Index

text: The album's release coincided with a change in Nico's look, when she adopted what has been called a "gothic horror princess" persona and "switched from dyed blonde to dark henna and started wearing black, heavy fabrics and boots". As a result, in addition to being a musical prototype for the goth subculture, Nico became a visual one as well. Claire Marie Healy wrote, "Nico's visual statement of these years speaks of the power that comes with creating a new persona for yourself" and she described the singer as "the first ever goth girl". By the early 1980s, many women began to dress like Nico; nicknamed "Nico-teens", they were the first goth girls, encouraging a cult following for the singer.


title: The Marble Index

text: The information regarding lists including "The Marble Index" is adapted from Acclaimed Music, except where noted.


title: Amway

text: Amway (short for "American Way") is an American multi-level marketing (MLM) company that sells health, beauty, and home care products. The company was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos and is based in Ada, Michigan. Amway and its sister companies under Alticor reported sales of $8.4 billion in 2019. It conducts business through a number of affiliated companies in more than a hundred countries and territories.


title: Amway

text: Amway has been investigated in various countries and by institutions such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for alleged pyramid scheme practices. It has never been found guilty, though it has paid tens of millions of dollars to settle these suits.


title: Amway

text: Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos had been friends since school days and business partners in various endeavors, including a hamburger stand, an air charter service, and a sailing business. In 1949, they were introduced to the Nutrilite Products Corporation by Van Andel's second cousin Neil Maaskant. DeVos and Van Andel signed up to become distributors for Nutrilite food supplements in August. They sold their first box the next day for $19.50, but lost interest for the next two weeks. They traveled to Chicago to attend a Nutrilite seminar soon afterward, at the urging of Maaskant, who had become their sponsor. They watched promotional filmstrips and listened to talks by company representatives and successful distributors, then they decided to pursue the Nutrilite business. They sold their second box of supplements on their return trip to Michigan, and rapidly proceeded to develop the business further.


title: Amway

text: Earlier in 1949, DeVos and Van Andel had formed the Ja-Ri Corporation (abbreviated from their respective first names) to import wooden goods from South American countries. After the Chicago seminar, they turned Ja-Ri into a Nutrilite distributorship instead. In addition to profits on each product sold, Nutrilite offered commissions on sales made by new distributors introduced to the company by existing distributors—a system known as multi-level marketing or network marketing. By 1958, DeVos and Van Andel had built an organization of more than 5,000 distributors. However, they and some of their top distributors formed the American Way Association, or Amway, in April 1959 in response to concerns about the stability of Nutrilite and in order to represent the distributors and look for additional products to market.


title: Amway

text: Their first product was called Frisk, an organic cleaner developed by a scientist in Ohio. DeVos and Van Andel bought the rights to manufacture and distribute Frisk, and later changed the name to LOC (Liquid Organic Cleaner). They subsequently formed the Amway Sales Corporation to procure and inventory products and to handle sales and marketing plans, and the Amway Services Corporation to handle insurance and other benefits for distributors. In 1960, they purchased a 50% share in Atco Manufacturing Company in Detroit, the original manufacturers of LOC, and changed its name to Amway Manufacturing Corporation. In 1964, the Amway Sales Corporation, Amway Services Corporation, and Amway Manufacturing Corporation merged to form the Amway Corporation.


title: Amway

text: Amway expanded to Australia in 1971, to parts of Europe in 1973, to parts of Asia in 1974, to Japan in 1979, to Latin America in 1985, to Thailand in 1987, to China in 1995, to Africa in 1997, to India and Scandinavia in 1998, to Ukraine in 2003, to Russia in 2005, and to Vietnam in 2008.


title: Amway

text: In 2014, a Russian loyalty card program called "Alfa-Amway" was created when Amway joined with Alfa-Bank.


title: Amway

text: Amway was ranked by "Forbes" as the 42nd-largest privately held company in the United States in 2018, and as the number one largest company on the "Direct Selling News" Global 100 list in 2018.


title: Amway

text: The founders of the Amway corporation established a new holding company in 1999, named Alticor, and launched three new companies: a sister (and separate) Internet-focused company named Quixtar, Access Business Group, and Pyxis Innovations. Pyxis, later replaced by Fulton Innovation, pursued research and development and Access Business Group handled manufacturing and logistics for Amway, Quixtar, and third-party clients.


title: Amway

text: The main difference was that all "Independent Business Owners" (IBO) could order directly from Amway on the Internet, rather than from their upline "direct distributor", and have products shipped directly to their home. The Amway name continued being used in the rest of the world. After virtually all Amway distributors in North America switched to Quixtar, Alticor elected to close Amway North America after 2001. In June 2007 it was announced that the Quixtar brand would be phased out over an 18-to-24-month period in favor of a unified Amway brand (Amway Global) worldwide.


title: Amway

text: In 2006, Quixtar published "The Quixtar Independent Business Owner Compensation Plan", in which the company reported that the average monthly gross income for "Active" IBOs was $115.


title: Amway

text: According to the Amway website, the company operated in over 100 countries and territories, organized into regional markets: the Americas, Europe, greater China, Japan and Korea, and SE Asia/Australia. Amway's top ten markets are China, Korea, the United States, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, India, Russia, Malaysia and Italy.


title: Amway

text: In 2008, Alticor announced that two-thirds of the company's 58 markets reported sales increases, including strong growth in the China, Russia, Ukraine and India markets.


title: Amway

text: Amway China launched in 1995. In 1998, after abuses of illegal pyramid schemes led to riots, the Chinese government enacted a ban on all direct selling companies, including Amway. After the negotiations, some companies like Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay continued to operate through a network of retail stores promoted by an independent sales force. China introduced new direct selling laws in December 2005, and in December 2006, Amway was one of the first companies to receive a license to resume direct sales. However, the law forbids teachers, doctors, and civil servants from becoming direct sales agents for the company and, unlike in the United States, salespeople in China are ineligible to receive commissions from sales made by the distributors they recruit.


title: Amway

text: In 2006, Amway China had a reported 180,000 sales representatives, 140 stores, and $2 billion in annual sales. In 2007, Amway Greater China and South-east Asia Chief Executive Eva Cheng was ranked no. 88 by "Forbes" magazine in its list of the World's Most Powerful Women. In 2008, China was Amway's largest market, reporting 28% growth and sales of 17 billion yuan (US$2.5 billion). According to a report in "Bloomberg Businessweek" in April 2010, Amway had 237 retail shops in China, 160,000 direct sales agents, and $3 billion in revenue. Since then, Amway has been continuing to expand in China, even as the government has been imposing greater restrictions on the company, and launched a WeChat mini-program in 2021.


title: Amway

text: Amway's product line grew from LOC, with the laundry detergent SA8 added in 1960, and later the hair care product Satinique (1965) and the cosmetics line Artistry (1968). Today Amway manufactures over 450 products, with manufacturing facilities in China, India and the US, as well as Nutrilite organic farms in Brazil, Mexico and the US (California and Washington state). Amway brands include Artistry, Atmosphere, Body Blends, Bodykey, Body Works, Clear Now, eSpring, Glister, iCook, Legacy of Clean, Nutrilite, Peter Island, Perfect Empowered Drinking Water, Personal Accents, Ribbon, Satinique, Artistry Men and XS.


title: Amway

text: In 2018, nutrition and wellness products were 52% of total sales, and beauty and personal care products were 26% of total sales.


title: Amway

text: Amway is best known in North America for its original multi-purpose cleaning product LOC, SA8 laundry detergent, and Dish Drops dishwashing liquid. In the January 2007 issue of "Consumer Reports", SA8 with Bioquest was rated the best-performing laundry detergent. "Consumer Reports" did, however, criticize SA8's pricing, a situation which was disputed by Amway. Consumer Reports conducted blind testing of detergents in 2010 and ranked versions of Amway's Legacy of Clean detergents 9th and 18th of 20 detergents tested. "Consumer Reports" program manager Pat Slaven recommended against buying the products because consumers can "go to the grocery store and get something that performs a whole lot better for a whole lot less money".


title: Amway

text: Amway's health and beauty brands include Artistry, Satinique, Hymm, Body Series, Glister, Moiskin (South America), Nutrilite, Nutriway (Scandinavia and Australia/New Zealand), Attitude (India), eSpring, Atmosphere and iCook as well as XL and XS Energy drinks. Other Amway brands that were discontinued or replaced include Tolsom, Eddie Funkhouser New York, or beautycycle (Eastern Europe).


title: Amway

text: Amway's Artistry products include skin care, cosmetics, and anti-aging creams and serums. In 2011, Artistry brand reached sales of $2.8 billion.


title: Amway

text: Amway's largest-selling brand is the Nutrilite range of health supplements (marketed as Nutriway in some countries), and in 2008 Nutrilite sales exceeded $3 billion globally. In 2001, NSF International issued its first five dietary supplement certifications to Nutrilite.


title: Amway

text: In 2011, Nutrilite brand of vitamins and dietary supplements led Amway's sales, totaling almost $4.7 billion. According to Euromonitor International, in 2014, Nutrilite was the world's No. 1 selling vitamins and dietary supplements brand. In 2015, it was reported that according to Euromonitor International, Amway was the largest vitamin and dietary supplement vendor in China, with 11% of a market that generated 100 billion yuan ($15.6 billion) in annual sales. In 2015, it was reported that according to China Confidential consumer brands survey, Amway Nutrilite was the most popular vitamin and dietary supplement brand in China.


title: Amway

text: In January 2009, Amway announced a voluntary recall of Nutrilite and XS Energy Bars after learning that they had possibly been manufactured with Salmonella-contaminated ingredients from Peanut Corporation of America. The company indicated that it had not received any reports of illness in connection with the products.


title: Amway

text: In 2012, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), accused Amway of making unsubstantiated and illegal claims about Nutrilite Fruits & Vegetables 2GO Twist Tubes and threatened to launch a class action lawsuit against the company unless it took remedial action. Amway responded that the claims made about the products were properly substantiated and that they did not plan to change the product's labeling but nevertheless would review the statements that CSPI has questioned. CSPI later reported that Amway had agreed to changing product labels by the end of 2014.


title: Amway

text: Amway's eSpring water filter was introduced in 2000. According to Amway, it was the first system to combine a carbon block filter and ultraviolet light with electronic-monitoring technology in the filter cartridge and it became the first home system to achieve certification for ANSI/NSF Standards 42, 53, and 55. According to Amway, eSpring was the first water treatment system to receive certification for all fifteen NSF/ANSI 401 contaminants which include pharmaceuticals, pesticides and herbicides. The company also claims that, in addition to these 15 contaminants, eSpring is certified for more than 145 potential contaminants, including lead and mercury.


title: Amway

text: eSpring was the first commercial product which employed Fulton Innovation's eCoupled wireless power induction technology. In December 2006, Amway sister company, Fulton Innovations, announced that it would introduce eCoupled technology in other consumer electronic products at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show. Companies licensing this technology include Visteon, Herman Miller, Motorola and Mobility Electronics. Fulton was a founding member of the Wireless Power Consortium which developed the Qi (inductive power standard).


title: Amway

text: In 2007 eSpring was ranked fifth out of 27 brands in a comparison of water filters by "Consumer Reports".


title: Amway

text: On January 14, 2015, Amway announced that it had acquired XS Energy, a California-based brand of energy drinks and snacks. The XS Energy brand has been sold as an Amway product since 2003. As of January 2015, it has been distributed in 38 countries, generating annual sales of $150 million.


title: Amway

text: According to Euromonitor International, the XS Energy was the first exclusively sugar-free energy drink brand sold globally.


title: Amway

text: Ditto Delivery is Alticor's automatic, monthly replenishment program that fills orders based on customers' predetermined needs. As of May 2001, Ditto Delivery accounted for 30% of Quixtar's North American sales.


title: Amway

text: Amway combines direct selling with a multi-level marketing strategy. Amway distributors, referred to as "independent business owners" (IBOs), may market products directly to potential customers and may also sponsor and mentor other people to become IBOs. IBOs may earn income both from the retail markup on any products they sell personally, plus a performance bonus based on the sales volume they and their downline (IBOs they have sponsored) have generated. People may also register as IBOs to buy products at discounted prices. Harvard Business School, which described Amway as "one of the most profitable direct selling companies in the world", noted that Amway founders Van Andel and DeVos "accomplished their success through the use of an elaborate pyramid-like distribution system in which independent distributors of Amway products received a percentage of the merchandise they sold and also a percentage of the merchandise sold by recruited distributors".


title: Amway

text: In December 2006, Alticor secured the naming rights for the Orlando Magic's home basketball arena in Orlando, Florida. The Orlando Magic are owned by the DeVos family. The arena, formerly known as the TD Waterhouse Centre, was renamed the Amway Arena. Its successor, the Amway Center, was opened in 2010, and the older arena was demolished in 2012.


title: Amway

text: In 2009, Amway Global signed a three-year deal with the San Jose Earthquakes Major League Soccer team to become the jersey sponsor.


title: Amway

text: In March 2009, Amway Global signed a multi-year deal to become the presenting partner of the Los Angeles Sol of Women's Professional Soccer. The deal, however, would last only one year, as the Sol folded in 2010.


title: Amway

text: In 2011, Amway signed a three-year deal to be the presenting sponsor of the National Hockey League's Detroit Red Wings.


title: Amway

text: Since 2012, Amway has been the title sponsor of the Canadian Championship, an annual soccer tournament.


title: Amway

text: In the 1990s, the Amway organization was a major contributor to the Republican Party (GOP) and to the election campaigns of various GOP candidates. Amway and its sales force contributed a substantial amount (up to half) of the total funds ($669,525) for the 1994 political campaign of Republican congresswoman and Amway distributor Sue Myrick (N.C.). According to two reports by "Mother Jones" magazine, Amway distributor Dexter Yager "used the company's extensive voice-mail system to rally hundreds of Amway distributors into giving a total of $295,871" to Myrick's campaign. According to a campaign staffer quoted by the magazine, Myrick had appeared regularly on the Amway circuit, speaking at hundreds of rallies and selling $5 and $10 audiotapes. Following the 1994 election, Myrick maintained "close ties to Amway and Yager", and raised $100,000 from Amway sources, "most notably through fundraisers at the homes of big distributors", in the 1997–98 election cycle.


title: Amway

text: In October 1994, Amway gave the biggest corporate contribution recorded to that date to a political party for a single election, $2.5 million to the Republican National Committee (RNC), and was the number one corporate political donor in the United States. In the 2004 election cycle, the organization contributed a total of $4 million to a conservative 527 group, Progress for America.


title: Amway

text: In July 1996, Amway co-founder Richard DeVos was honored at a $3 million fundraiser for the Republican Party, and a week later, it was reported that Amway had tried to donate $1.3 million to pay for Republican "infomercials" and televising of the GOP convention on Pat Robertson's Family Channel, but backed off when Democrats criticized the donation as a ploy to avoid campaign-finance restrictions.


title: Amway

text: In April 1997, Richard DeVos and his wife, Helen, gave $1 million to the RNC, which, at the time, was the second-largest soft-money donation ever, behind Amway's 1994 gift of $2.5 million to the RNC. In July 1997, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Newt Gingrich slipped a last-minute provision into a hotly contested compromise tax bill that granted Amway and four other companies a tax break on their Asian branches that totaled $19 million.


title: Amway

text: In a column published in the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" newspaper in August 1997, reporter Molly Ivins wrote that Amway had "its own caucus in Congress...Five Republican House members are also Amway distributors: Reps. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, Jon Christensen of Nebraska, Dick Chrysler of Michigan, Richard Pombo of California, and John Ensign of Nevada. Their informal caucus meets several times a year with Amway bigwigs to discuss policy matters affecting the company, including China's trade status."


title: Amway

text: A 1998 analysis of campaign contributions conducted by "Businessweek" found that Amway, along with the founding families and some top distributors, had donated at least $7 million to GOP causes in the preceding decade. Political candidates who received campaign funding from Amway in 1998 included Representatives Bill Redmond (R–N.M.), Heather Wilson (R–N.M.), and Jon Christensen (R–Neb).


title: Amway

text: According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, in the 2004 election cycle, members of the Van Andel and DeVos families were the second, third and fifth largest donors to the Republican party.


title: Amway

text: Dick DeVos, son of Amway founder Richard DeVos and past president of the company, served as Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his wife Betsy DeVos served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and 2003 to 2005.


title: Amway

text: In May 2005, Dick DeVos ran against incumbent Governor Jennifer Granholm in Michigan's 2006 gubernatorial election. DeVos was defeated by Granholm, who won 56% of the popular vote to his 42%.


title: Amway

text: In August 2012, gay rights activist Fred Karger began a movement to boycott Amway in protest of the contribution from a private foundation of Amway President Doug DeVos to the National Organization for Marriage, a political organization which opposes legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States.


title: Amway

text: Several sources have commented on the promotion of Christian conservative ideology within the Amway organization. "Mother Jones" magazine described the Amway distributor force as "heavily influenced by the company's dual themes of Christian morality and free enterprise" and operating "like a private political army". In "The Cult of Free Enterprise", Stephen Butterfield, who spent time in the Yager group within Amway, wrote "[Amway] sells a marketing and motivational system, a cause, a way of life, in a fervid emotional atmosphere of rallies and political religious revivalism." "Philadelphia City Paper" correspondent Maryam Henein stated that "The language used in motivational tools for Amway frequently echoes or directly quotes the Bible, with the unstated assumption of a shared Christian perspective."


title: Amway

text: "Businessweek" correspondents Bill Vlasic and Beth Regan characterized the founding families of Amway as "fervently conservative, fervently Christian, and hugely influential in the Republican Party", noting that "Rich DeVos charged up the troops with a message of Christian beliefs and rock-ribbed conservatism."


title: Amway

text: High-ranking Amway leaders such as Richard DeVos and Dexter Yager were owners and members of the board of Gospel Films, a producer of movies and books geared toward conservative Christians, as well as co-owners (along with Salem Communications) of a right-wing, Christian nonprofit called Gospel Communications International. Yager, interviewed on "60 Minutes" in 1983, admitted that he promotes Christianity through his Amway group, but stated that this might not be the case in other Amway groups.


title: Amway

text: "Rolling Stone's" Bob Moser reported that former Amway CEO and co-founder Richard DeVos is connected with the Dominionist political movement in the United States. Moser states that DeVos was a supporter of the late D. James Kennedy, giving more than $5 million to Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries. DeVos was also a founding member and two-time president of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing Christian organization.


title: Amway

text: Sociologist David G. Bromley calls Amway a "quasi-religious corporation" having sectarian characteristics. Bromley and Anson Shupe view Amway as preaching the gospel of prosperity. Patralekha Bhattacharya and Krishna Kumar Mehta, of the consulting firm Thinkalytics, LLC, reasoned that although some critics have referred to organizations such as Amway as "cults" and have speculated that they engage in "mind control", there are other explanations that could account for the behavior of distributors. Namely, continued involvement of distributors despite minimal economic return may result from social satisfaction compensating for diminished economic satisfaction.


title: Amway

text: Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel (in 1980), and later his son Steve Van Andel (in 2001), were elected by the board of directors of the United States Chamber of Commerce to be the chairman of the private American lobbying organization.


title: Amway

text: In 2006, Amway (then Quixtar in North America) introduced its "Professional Development Accreditation Program" in response to concerns surrounding business support materials (BSM), including books, tapes and meetings. In 2010 this was superseded by its "Accreditation Plus" program to ensure that all BSM content is consistent with Amway's quality assurance standards, which approved providers of BSM must abide by. The quality assurance standards state that


title: Amway

text: Robert Carroll, of the "Skeptic's Dictionary", has described Amway as a "legal pyramid scheme", and has said that the quasi-religious devotion of its affiliates is used by the company to conceal poor performance rates by distributors.


title: Amway

text: In a 1979 ruling, the Federal Trade Commission found that Amway did not fit the definition of a pyramid scheme because (a) distributors were not paid to recruit people, (b) it did not require distributors to buy a large stock of unmoving inventory, (c) distributors were required to maintain retail sales (at least 10 per month), and (d) the company and all distributors were required to accept returns of excess inventory from down-level distributors.


title: Amway

text: The FTC did, however, find Amway "guilty of price-fixing and making exaggerated income claims"; the company was ordered to stop retail price fixing and allocating customers among distributors and was prohibited from misrepresenting the amount of profit, earnings or sales its distributors are likely to achieve with the business. Amway was ordered to accompany any such statements with the actual averages per distributor, pointing out that more than half of the distributors do not make any money, with the average distributor making less than $100 per month. The order was violated with a 1986 ad campaign, resulting in a $100,000 fine.


title: Amway

text: Studies of independent consumer watchdog agencies have shown that between 990 and 999 of 1000 participants in MLMs that use Amway-type pay plans in fact lose money. According to The Skeptic's Dictionary, "In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission requires Amway to label its products with the message that 54% of Amway recruits make nothing and the rest earn on average $65 a month."


title: Amway

text: In September 2006, following a public complaint, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana state police (CID) initiated raids and seizures against Amway distributors in the state, and submitted a petition against them, claiming the company violated the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act. They shut down all corporate offices associated with the Amway organization including the offices of some Amway distributors. The enforcement said that the business model of the company is illegal. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had notified the police that Amway in India may be violating certain laws regarding a "money circulation scheme" and the "IB Times" article writes that "some say ... Amway is really more about making money from recruiting people to become distributors, as opposed to selling products". In 2008, the state government of Andhra Pradesh enacted a ban on Amway media advertisements.


title: Amway

text: On August 6, 2011, Kerala Police sealed the offices of Amway at Kozhikode, Kannur, Kochi, Kottayam, Thrissur, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram following complaints. In November 2012, the Economic Offences Wing of Kerala Police conducted searches at the offices of Amway at Kozhikode, Thrissur and Kannur as part of its crackdown on money chain activities and closed down the firm's warehouses at these centres. Products valued at 21.4 million rupees (about US$400,000 at the time) were also seized. Later, Area manager of Amway, P. M. Rajkumar, who was arrested following searches was remanded in judicial custody for 14 days.


title: Amway

text: On May 27, 2013, Crime Branch officials of Kerala Police arrested William S. Pinckney, Managing Director & CEO of Amway India Enterprises along with two other directors of the company from Kozhikode. The three were arrested on charges of running a pyramid scheme. They were granted bail the next day and the business was unaffected. On June 8, 2013, Kozhikode Court lifted the freeze on Amway offices in Kerala. On May 26, 2014, Pinckney was arrested by Andhra Pradesh police on the basis of a consumer complaint that alleged unethical circulation of money by Amway. He was subsequently arrested in other criminal cases registered against him in the state on allegations of financial irregularities by the company. Pinckney was jailed for two months until being released on bail.


title: Amway

text: In 2017, a Chandigarh court framed charges, under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code and the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Scheme (Banning) Act, against two directors of Amway India, William Scot Pinckney and Prithvai Raj Bijlani. This was based on a cheating case filed by eight complainants in 2002, following which the Economic Offences Wing had filed chargesheet in 2012. A revision plea moved by the two Amway officials against the framed charges was dismissed in 2018.


title: Amway

text: In April 2022, the Enforcement Directorate attached both movable and immovable assets of Amway India worth including the firm's factory in Dindigul along with bank accounts under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).


title: Amway

text: On November 3, 2010, Amway announced that it had agreed to pay $56 million—$34 million in cash and $22 million in products—to settle a class action that had been filed in Federal District Court in California in 2007. The class action, which had been brought against Quixtar and several of its top-level distributors, alleged fraud, racketeering, and that the defendants operated as an illegal pyramid scheme.


title: Amway

text: Amway, while noting that the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing or liability, acknowledged that it had made changes to its business operations as a result of the lawsuit. The settlement is subject to approval by the court, which was expected in early 2011. The economic value of the settlement, including the changes Amway made to its business model, totals $100 million.


title: Amway

text: A 2009 class action case lodged in Canada was rejected by the Federal Court and confirmed on appeal by the Federal Court of Appeal, with costs awarded to Amway and the plaintiffs directed to arbitration.


title: Amway

text: The DeVoses supported an amendment to the US House of Representatives' omnibus Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2018 by US Representative John Moolenaar that would have limited the ability of the FTC to investigate whether MLMs are pyramid schemes. The amendment would have barred the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Small Business Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FTC, or any other agencies from using any monies to take enforcement actions against pyramid operations for the fiscal year. It also adopted provisions from H.R. 3409, the so-called "Anti-Pyramid Scheme Promotion Act of 2016", which would blur the lines between legitimate MLM activity and pyramid schemes established under the original 1979 FTC case by deeming sales made to people inside the company as sales to an "ultimate user," thus erasing the key distinction made in the ruling between sales to actual consumers of a product and sales made to members of the MLM network as part of recruitment of members or to qualify for commissions. The amendment was opposed by a coalition of consumer interest groups including Consumer Action, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union (the publisher of "Consumer Reports" magazine), Consumer Watchdog, the National Consumers League, and the United States Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), as well as Truth in Advertising (TINA.org) in its original incarnation.


title: Amway

text: In 1982, Amway co-founders, Richard M. DeVos and Jay Van Andel, along with Amway's executive vice president for corporate services, William J. Discher Jr., were indicted in Canada on several criminal charges, including allegations that they underreported the value of goods brought into the country and had defrauded the Canadian government of more than $28 million from 1965 to 1980. The charges were dropped in 1983 after Amway and its Canadian subsidiary pleaded guilty to criminal customs fraud charges. The companies paid a fine of $25 million CAD, the largest fine ever imposed in Canada at the time. In 1989 the company settled the outstanding customs duties for $45 million CAD. In a 1994 article authored by DeVos, he stated that the guilty plea was entered for technical reasons, despite believing they were innocent of the charges, and that he believed that the case had been motivated by "political reasons".


title: Amway

text: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as part of its anti-piracy efforts, sued Amway and several distributors in 1996, alleging that copyrighted music was used on "highly profitable" training videotapes. Amway denied wrongdoing, blaming the case on a misunderstanding by distributors, and settled the case out of court for $9 million. In a related lawsuit initiated by the distributors involved, the Court established that Mahaleel Lee Luster, who had been contracted to make the videotapes, had violated copyright without the knowledge of three of the five of those distributors.


title: Amway

text: In 2007, Amway's operations were halted in the United Kingdom and Ireland following a yearlong investigation by the UK Department of Trade and Industry, which moved to have Amway banned on the basis that the company had employed deceptive marketing, presented inflated earnings estimates, and lured distributors into buying bogus "motivation and training" tools. In 2008, a UK judge dismissed government claims against Amway's operations, saying major reforms in the prior year (which included banning non-Amway-approved motivational events and materials) had fixed company faults that favoured selling training materials over products and misrepresented earnings. However, the judge also expressed his belief that Amway allowed "misrepresentations" of its business by independent sellers in years past and failed to act decisively against the misrepresentations.


title: Amway

text: In 1997, Amway Poland and Network TwentyOne separately sued the makers of a Polish film, "Welcome to Life" (), for defamation and copyright violations. Henryk Dederko (the director) and producer were later acquitted on the charge of disseminating false information. The film, banned for 12 years, was one of the highly anticipated movies of 2009's Warsaw Film Festival and was dubbed by the promoters as a "scary movie about brainwashing" It was said to depict hard-sell "pep rallies", and to include statements from distributors that meetings had a similar tone to meetings of the Communist Party before it lost power in Poland. Methods of recruitment that confusingly resembled those of a sect were also described. A bestseller on the local video black market, the film was banned while the suit proceeded.


title: Amway

text: In 2001 a regional court ruled in favor of Network 21; however, in 2004 the Warsaw Regional Court dismissed Amway's civil lawsuit. On appeal Amway won the case and the producers were ordered to pay a fine to a children's charity and publish a public apology. the film was still banned due to an ongoing case brought by "private individuals" ridiculed in the film.


title: Amway

text: On December 18, 2012, the court ruled that film can be screened, but the makers have to remove "untrue information", as the screen near the end of the movie stated that 30% of company income is generated by sales of training materials and that the vast majority of its profits are shared only by the tiny fraction of top distributors. This is not the only court case, so the film is still banned on other grounds.


title: Amway

text: In March 2004, TV personality Phil McGraw (a.k.a. Dr. Phil) pulled his "Shape Up" line of supplements off the market in the face of an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The supplements were manufactured by CSA Nutraceuticals, a subsidiary of Alticor's Access Business Group. The FTC later dropped the probe, but in October 2005 a class-action lawsuit was filed against McGraw by several people who used the products and claimed that the supplements, which cost $120 per month, did not stimulate weight loss. In September 2006, a $10.5 million settlement was reached, in which Alticor agreed to provide $4.5 million in cash and $6 million in Nutrilite products to disgruntled users of Shape Up.


title: Amway

text: Some Amway distributors distributed an urban legend that the (old) Procter & Gamble service mark was in fact a Satanic symbol or that the CEO of P&G is himself a practicing Satanist. (In some variants of the story, it is also claimed that the CEO of Procter & Gamble donated "satanic tithes" to the Church of Satan.) Procter & Gamble alleged that several Amway distributors were behind a resurgence of the story in the 1990s and sued several independent Amway distributors and the company for defamation and slander. The distributors had used Amway's Amvox voice messaging service to send the rumor to their downline distributors in April 1995. By 2003, after more than a decade of lawsuits in multiple states, all allegations against Amway and Amway distributors had been dismissed. In October 2005, a Utah appeals court reversed part of the decision dismissing the case against the four Amway distributors, and remanded it to the lower court for further proceedings. In the lawsuit against the four former Amway distributors, Procter & Gamble was awarded $19.25 million by a U.S. District Court jury in Salt Lake City on March 20, 2007. On November 24, 2008, the case was officially settled. "It's hard to imagine they'd pursue it this long, especially after all the retractions we put out," said distributor Randy Haugen, a 53-year-old Ogden, Utah, businessman who maintained P&G was never able to show how it was harmed by the rumors. "We are stunned. All of us."


title: Amway

text: In January 2017, the Vietnam Ministry of Industry and Trade determined that Amway Vietnam had violated federal regulations by engaging in unauthorized multi-level marketing.


title: Amway

text: Some Amway distributor groups have been accused of using "cult-like" tactics to attract new distributors and keep them involved and committed. Allegations include resemblance to a Big Brother organization with a paranoid attitude toward insiders critical of the organization, seminars and rallies resembling religious revival meetings, and enormous involvement of distributors despite minimal incomes. An examination of the 1979–1980 tax records in the state of Wisconsin showed that the Direct Distributors reported a net loss of $918 on average.


title: Amway

text: In 2004, "Dateline NBC" featured a critical report based on a yearlong undercover investigation of business practices of Quixtar. The report noted that the average distributor makes only about $1,400 per year and that many of the "high level distributors singing the praises of Quixtar" are actually "making most of their money by selling motivational books, tapes and seminars; not Quixtar's cosmetics, soaps, and electronics".


title: Amway

text: "In fact, about twenty high level distributors are part of an exclusive club; one that those hundreds of thousands of other distributors don't get to join. For years only a privileged few, including Bill Britt, have run hugely profitable businesses selling all those books, tapes and seminars; things the rank and file distributors can't sell themselves but, are told over and over again, they need to buy in order to succeed."


title: Amway

text: The program said that a Quixtar recruiter featured in the report made misleading and inconsistent statements about Quixtar earnings during a recruitment meeting and had an outstanding arrest warrant for cocaine possession from the mid-90s.


title: Amway

text: In a response to the "Dateline" report, Quixtar published a "Dateline Quixtar Response" on its official website. In its response, Quixtar stated:


title: Amway

text: "We learned that two Dateline producers had registered as IBOs and for months had been conducting undercover research for the story, which included using a hidden camera to videotape meetings and conversations with IBOs. The producers did not identify themselves as working for Dateline, instead feigning interest in building a business powered by Quixtar."