Cisco Enterprise Routers Reviews

We are using the Cisco product in the core Banking industries, and Linksys products are being used in educational institutes and small enterprises.

We are using Cisco switches as a core switch in the Education sector, such as engineering colleges or in small colleges but in the main colleges, we are using the Cisco switches. 

The primary use case of this solution is for parallel branches in the banking sector for the cloud and with IPSec.

With Cisco Linksys, we need better pricing. Cisco is an expensive product, much more so that other products, such as those by HP.

The Cisco Switches and Routers price should be reduced.

We need better pricing and support.

For Cisco Routers, we need better pricing, better implementation, and support.

I have been selling Cisco Linksys Switches for 15 years.

There are only a few models available in India. Nowadays, we are selling Cisco with Linksys.

We are selling Cisco Wi-Fi routers and switches under the name of Linksys, and other products are available under the Cisco branding.

I have been selling Cisco Enterprise Routers for approximately 16 years.

Both the switches and routers are stable products.

In India, 50% of the customers are using Cisco and the other 50% are using other products.

We plan to continue selling Cisco Routers, as it's a never-ending demand from our customers.

The Cisco line support is not good in India. It takes too long. You can email or go live, but it takes more time to get support from Cisco.

The installation of Cisco Switches or Routers is never easy.

They are command line only, while other routers have a GUI, which is easier to install.

The deployment of the router can take anywhere from one hour to three days.

The switches can take four hours.

Linksys products are cheaper than Cisco Switches.

Cisco Switches are an expensive product in India.

Cisco is the number one brand in India. I would recommend this product.

Cisco is a good product that is stable. However, because of pricing, customers go with other brands.

I would rate Cisco a nine out of ten.

The best part is that once you set up Cisco routers, you just leave them alone. You don't have to do much unless you have to change the configuration. We hardly have issues with Cisco equipment and I believe that reliability is the best part of Cisco.

Compared to equipment by other vendors, such as Check Point, the physical size of the units is bigger. A smaller footprint would be an improvement. 

We sometimes experience delays when a router is processing that requires us to reboot it.

I have been working with Cisco Enterprise Routers for more than 20 years.

Cisco's equipment is stable.

This is a scalable product and we have a couple of hundred users.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have Cisco certified engineers here, and they take care of that. The deployment takes maybe a couple of hours, and we're done.

We have an in-house team of four or five people who deploy and maintain our products, including this one. 

This is definitely a product that I can recommend to others.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Cisco Enterprise Routers for implementing properties and features.

The routing platform is good.

I have been using Cisco Enterprise Routers for roughly 15 years.

This solution is both stable and scalable.

The technical support is okay.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

I am happy with the price of Cisco Enterprise Routers, but they could offer more discounts to their customers.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

I am working in a cloud company with multiple clients, who are purchasing multiple could services, servers, and small networks. We deploy a Cisco firewall and a virtual firewall.

The most valuable features are that it is more secure and easy to operate.

It handles several requests well. Overall it is very good and there are not many available in the market.

Accountability, reliability, and support are very good.

Some of the features could be more secure. For example, firewall features could have better security. There are some routers that come with this feature. It can be implemented with ACL, but there is only one destination source with IP based filtering.

If it is possible then it would be content-based. It is available in the new routers. If we were to purchase the new Data Centre Series router, it would include this feature.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

I have experience with both the 3900 series and the 1000 series.

It's a stable solution.

This is a scalable product.

Technical support is good, and the documentation is also good. When we create and submit a ticket, the issue gets resolved.

You can easily find the documentation on the support portal. Also, there are multiple documents available on the internet.

It is easy to deploy and takes 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the configuration you want to upload and the type of security.

The price is reasonable.

Overall, it's a really good product. Anyone who decides to use a light product in the market that is not reliable, the security would be risky. 

Cisco enterprise routers are more secure and easy to operate.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use these routers for establishing connections between different sites. These connections allow our users at different locations to access the network.

The feature that I like most is the routing.

This product is very easy to use.

Cisco has a lot of problems with the graphical interfaces used for management. 

We have been working with Cisco Enterprise Routers for almost 10 years.

These routers are very stable.

The technical support is very good.

Cisco routers are very pricey. This is the biggest complaint from customers for which we provide support.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is very easy to use, and there is a large community to support you. I recommend checking the licensing because sometimes when you buy the product, you may forget to check the licensing and warranty information.

We have seen that most clients work with third-parties when it comes to a monitoring solution for Cisco routers.

In summary, this is a good product and one that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our client primarily uses the solution for a Computer Base Test Center.

The durability of the solution is excellent.

They offer a variety of very good features.

The pricing of the solution needs improvement.

The solution is usually stable. It could be based on design, but on a particular router that I received, I noticed it started overheating at one point, so it kept shutting down. This may be because of where I purchased the router, however.

The initial setup of the solution is quite easy if you are a technical person. If you are not a technical person it can take a while. A technical person should be able to deploy it in 25-45 minutes.

We use the enterprise version of the solution. I deploy it for our clients.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is for Internet access and firewall.

The commitment to Cisco products based on their advice and knowing our model and what we wanted to accomplish did not put us in an optimal situation. I do not think this solution has improved our organization.

I don't particularly like the product. The decision to go with Cisco was made by the company. Now they made an expensive investment so they feel we have to keep this equipment.

The capacity of the equipment should be improved. Cisco sells expensive equipment, but it does not really have greater performance compared to the price paid for it. So, we're paying very high prices for medium — or low to medium — capacity equipment.

One thing that I would like to see is a more user-friendly dashboard. Really it generally needs easier capabilities to do basic management of the product and the system for users who are not Cisco employees or representatives.

Though it is not directly the product, their technical support services can be improved. We have not had many problems with the product, but we pay for support and they have not really solved the issues we submitted to our satisfaction. It is the same with Cisco iOS. We know that when we install the next version, we have come to expect that something will break. Testing upgrades should be improved as well.

Around 70 people are currently using the products. There are two administrative or technical employees dedicated to maintenance. The scalability seems limited by performance.

We have opened cases with the Cisco customer support. Early on we didn't really have many issues. For what we pay for the platinum support, I don't think that they are doing a great effort in working with us. In one instance where it seemed to me that Cisco didn't really understand the problem, they tried to push us to get the newest equipment. The same equipment was working fine for the same thing about two months before that. So, it doesn't make sense to have to upgrade the equipment when something has broken that was working. I think that something was wrong either with the licensed upgrade on the iOS that did it. I don't know. But I do know that Cisco was not able to pinpoint exactly what the problem was and the solution they offered did not make sense. If it was hardware that we have a warranty for or an upgrade that they introduced, they should be able to locate the problem for clients paying a premium for their services. 

Reflecting on that incident, they seemed more interested in selling more equipment than to really dig deep and discover what the problem was.

Actually, it is the Cisco products we use now that we will be replaced with another solution. We did not move from something else to Cisco. We have plans to get rid of the equipment. We want to switch to another vendor which has more robust products for a lower cost. We pay too much for what we get in performance. The problem is not really in terms of capabilities but in terms of the capacity of the equipment. It makes no sense for us to have such expensive equipment where we can have router equipment with less complexity and then have proper firewalls behind it.

The features Cisco intends to include in their product are very limited due to the way the features affect the capacity of the equipment. For example, imagine that the equipment is capable of handling a hundred megabits of internet access without any additional features configured. After the additional features are enabled and configured to perform the job as advertised, the bandwidth and performance are reduced drastically. It makes no sense to have such expensive equipment if it does not do what is intended or if it does not do it as well as another configuration would using dedicated products. Cisco advertises all the things you can do, but then you get the overall capacity squeezed and it is not as great as advertised.

It is not exactly that the product does not do what it is advertised to do, but you lose the performance that you expected when going with this model. If we knew about this performance drawback before, then we would not have bought this expensive line of the product. We would have gone with something cheaper. It could even have been a different Cisco product, but we would configure the network in a different way. We would not do the firewall in JCL (Job Control Language) that's on the routers, but we would do it on a proper firewall. If we did not spend that much money on the gateway equipment, then we could get different equipment with a proper firewall using what we saved. 

I thought that the initial setup was very complex. Cisco does not have a straightforward logic for the configuration of the equipment. You need to do a lot of extra things. For example, you have to open a specific port to the outside to allow traffic, you have to review the ACL (Access Control List), and you need to review firewall provisions. It's a bit complicated to manage compared to other equipment and in other firewalls where it is a much simpler process. I find it complex to manage this Cisco solution and I am sure it can be simplified.

Our deployment took about two to three months, at best, to tune it up to make all work properly. It was not done alone by me, but it was all done in house. I have a good team of people, but it took too long to get everything dialed in. Even after that time, we had only met most of the requirements that were outlined. There was still more to do.

We have a team and did our own implementation.

We don't have any licenses at this time. There were some compensating licenses that needed to be renewed every year, but then Cisco ended that practice. It was also sort of the local price break for the solution. Currently, we just pay for the hardware once and extra for the warranty extension. Besides those costs, there were no additional expenses. We did pay additional for a specific module. It was from another company embedded inside the Cisco product and we had to renew every year on that license. But then Cisco stopped promoting the use of that feature. When they did the product performed better because the module was taking up too much of the CPU usage.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Cisco Enterprise Routers poorly from the experience that I have had. I would say a three or possibly four. I wish we had gotten the correct information from Cisco when we talked to them back when we were considering the solution. We told them what we wanted them to do and they recommended this solution. I think there may have been a miscalculation of the sizing of the equipment. So, I give it three out of ten because I could do the same or have the same or better result with a different solution that was not as expensive as this equipment.

The company and products are good overall, but they still overprice the equipment compared to the competition.

My advice to others considering this solution would be not to do what we did. Don't go with the all-in-one solution. Buy a basic product that Cisco certifies is more than capable of routing the traffic that you expect on the network, then get a decent firewall behind the router to really take care of security, content filtering, ACL and all the rest that a firewall does. It could be a bit expensive, of course, because you're buying two products instead of one. But what you can get out of it is much more than we get now from this Cisco solution.

It's not by any chance that when ISPs all over the world deliver an internet access line, they don't give you the top of the line support equipment. They don't push you to buy Cisco because it is the best. They give you something really basic because it's not supposed to do anything else than routing traffic from and to the internet. They expect you to have a firewall behind that router to manage all the rest of what a firewall is supposed to handle. Those providers know exactly what they're doing.

What I have learned from my experience with this product is to do more to check for something else as alternatives and compare products without just accepting a reputation and advice from the vending company's experts. You might not need to buy something expensive to really accomplish what you need to do. 

I use the router to connect to the internet.

The stability of the solution's router is its most valuable feature.

The configuration needs improvement. Most routers, like HP or Aruba, use a UI interface. Those solutions are similar and uniform. It's easier for us compared to Cisco because with Cisco you are not using normal commands. They need to enhance the UI to make it more usable.

The stability of the solution is fantastic. We haven't touched it for five years now. You just set it and forget it.

We don't contact Cisco technical support directly. If we have a problem, we can contact any one of the Cisco suppliers and they are able to give good support.

I didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was easy. Deployment only took one day.

I'd recommend the solution. Once you plug it in, you can basically forget about it because there are never any issues. It just works, and that's great. I'd rate it ten out of ten.