Everything you wanted to know about Cisco but were afraid to ask

Force Ten Networks

I met them last year when they tried to tempt us as a secondary sourceCisco reseller to sell their products instead of Cisco, my old friend and colleague (I shall call him VP) suggested that commercially it wasn't viable for us at the time. Technically speaking the Force Ten kit was faster for sheer shifting of moving large trunks of traffic from A to B but wasn't in the same league as Cisco for large IP Networks, only perhaps fat ISP's or Telco's and Carrier's level.

I was under the impression Juniper owned that area of the market but apparently not! I now know of at least two Cisco Telco customers currently decommissioning GSR12000 kit with OC192 and 10GIG Ethernet and rolling out an install over the next few months of Force Ten instead.

Where have the Cisco CRS-1 sales reps gone? Are they being priced out against Force Ten and Juniper? Are there only 200 CRS-1 install sites globally? I'm sure the take up of GSR12000 kit was massive compared to this, but perhaps it's too close to the transmission side of networking where competition is much more active.

Who knows maybe like plasma's when there has been more take up ofCRS-1 there will be a price drop of the GSR12000 and Cisco will start shifting them in numbers, at the moment GSR's work so well that replacing them with expensive CRS box's just isn't worth it ..... yet!