Cisco Enterprise Routers Reviews

We are a solution provider and we offer Cisco equipment, including their Enterprise Routers

These routers are primarily for internet edge connectivity, as well as wide area network connectivity.

The most valuable features are stability and features supported on these series.

These routers are not easy to use for non-professional users, so simplification is something that would improve this product. Having a well-designed graphical user interface would make this product easier to use.

I have been using Cisco Enterprise Routers for more than 15 years.

Cisco Enterprise Routers are stable.

This is a scalable product.

Technical support is good, although it depends on your service agreement with Cisco. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It has a setup wizard that can guide you through the very basic settings such as IP addresses, usernames, and passwords.

This is a good product and I will definitely continue to offer Cisco equipment to my customers in the future.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are mainly using this solution for networking and as a firewall.

The most valuable features are that it is easy to use, it is easy to configure, and manage.

There is a training center in each city.

Cisco is a long-lasting product.

The DNS system, which is very important, has not yet been implemented. All new Cisco switches are Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches that are DNL supported.

The price could be improved.

In Bangladesh, we do not have any expert-level support. We are having many issues implementing the DNS system.

We have been using the Cisco Switch, Router, and Firewall for 20 years.

Cisco Routers are scalable. We have approximately 1500 users in our company. Four are engineers that perform maintenance.

We have a Cisco office here, but no technical person on site. There is only a pre-sales person. It is part of our Cisco bundle to have a technical person on-site, but we able to speak with him.

Cisco Enterprise Routers are expensive.

Our company has been assigned networking for Cisco, we can't use any other products.

I would recommend the Cisco Enterprise Routers. It's an effective device.

I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

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.

I'm a Cisco specialist, and I implement Cisco devices, not always just for myself. We consult, implement, and design Cisco devices for our customers according to their needs and requirements. Just for the record, I am the CEO of my company: Atin Secure Systems ltd.

I feel free with Cisco's operation system (IOS), and specifically, it's CLI. The power of Cisco is it's software and OS, not just their hardware. Their end product is very stable, straightforward, and scalable. However, it takes time and energy for a beginner to be able to administer the CLI.

Cisco could update or release a new GUI. It needs a more extensive and comprehensive GUI, specifically for people who don't like using CLIs. I don't mind CLI but, I know based on my experience that not everyone prefers it. Unfortunately, Cisco promotes only to use CLI.

I am teaching Cisco up to CCNP level to my students, but up until today, I haven't been able to take the Cisco exams because we are banned from doing so in our country due to sanctions. We cannot even take the Cisco exams out of the country. I wanted to travel to Turkey to try, however, I was told I wouldn't be recognized even if I pass the exam.

I have been implementing, designing, troubleshooting, and teaching Cisco for ten years.

Cisco has the best stability I have ever seen. There aren't bugs or glitches, freeze, or crashes. It's very reliable.

The solution is very scalable. It's another feature that's great. You can add as many Cisco devices as you want to your project or your scenario if your initial design is correct. This can be done without any side effects and without any big changes.

We're based in Iran. We suffer from a lot of sanctions, so we don't have access to Cisco specialists or Cisco support. It's not allowed.

Cisco is somehow expensive in comparison to other vendors. Hence, we have switched to other brands only to satisfy the financial needs of our customers. Our only suggestion to customers is Cisco.

In my opinion, the initial set up is useless for a person (a specialist or a technician) who wants to run a full scenario. If I were Cisco, I would eliminate that initial setup.

Due to the sanctions on our country, we can't get outside help directly from Cisco. We need to handle the implementation ourselves.

The initial costs of using a full Cisco scenario like purchasing gears and licenses may be a little bit high. However, with accurate design and implementation, you should make sure you are good to go for years.

Cisco is the definition of computer networks in the industry. I have experience and knowledge in other brands like Mikrotik. However, Cisco is the best on the market.

You can't compare Cisco to any other gadget or any other solution. They're the best in the market, hands down. I have no choice other than giving them full marks of ten out of ten. I'd recommend Cisco to everyone.

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.