Cisco Phases Out Its 1700, 2600 and 3700 Series Routers

Cisco is retiring three of its multi-service router platforms, including the 2600 - one of the most widely-deployed WAN products for enterprise branches and mid-size businesses. Cisco's end-of-life and end-of-sale notice for the 1700, 2600 and 3700 series, posted last week, says the company will stop selling the series on March 27, 2007. However, support for the platform will be phased out slowly, with service and support to end on March 25, 2012. While Cisco is the dominant vendor in enterprise and small-and-midsize-business WAN routing with more than 70% market share, it has seen a ramp-up in competition lately from Juniper, with the release of its SSG — an integrated Juniper WAN router and Netscreen firewall, Nortel's acquisition of enterprise router maker Tasman Networks last year, and Alcatel's recent launch of its OmniAccess WAN router series also attempts to dig into Cisco's vast enterprise WAN installed base. Source: Network World Tags: Networking, Cisco, Gr33n Data