Which Is The Most Popular <i>Cisco Router</i> Series?

The most popular Cisco router series is the Cisco 7200 router series. The Cisco 7200 router combines flexibility with high performance needed for today's enterprise and VXR applications. This series supports a wide range of speeds from NxDS0 to OC-12, gigabit ethernet, and a wide variety of protocols including serial, ATM and pause. This series delivers exceptional performance, scalability as well as price and offers the largest range of deployment options. In fact, it can process up to 400,000 packets each second as well as offering many more high touch IP services. Most people believe that this model is the ideal WAN device for corporations as well as service providers.

One of the applications that comes with the Cisco 7200 router series are the VPN gateways. You'll get nothing but high performance encryption, compression services as well as key generation. Another great feature with the 7200 series are the broadband subscriber aggregation services. These are used for network operators to employ small as well as medium density aggregation. These will also work with telephone, telegraph, post, ISPs, competitive local exchange carriers as well as telegraph networks.


Cisco 7200 router series also offer multi service capabilities which are basically scalable voice Gateway solutions. You can use anywhere from 2 to 20 T1s or E1s. This particular router series makes the most ideal platform for a large number of enterprise and service provider solutions, because of the advanced QoS as well as the multi service features. The VXR chassis on this device also includes a multiservice interchange or MIX for short, which allows you to switch the DS0 timeslots through the MIX interconnects, which you can employ across the midplane and to every one of the port adapter slots.

Distribution of clocking is also supported through the midplane as well is the MIX, and this occurs between interfaces on this model and will also support your voice as well as other constant bit rate applications. Two full-duplex 8.192 Mb per second TDM streams are what you will find on the VXR midplane. 128 DS0 channels are what each stream is currently capable of supporting. You can switch DS0 timeslots with the Cisco 7200 VXR through the mix function between multichannel T-1 and E-1 interfaces, which are very similar to TDM functionalities.

Another good attribution to the Cisco 7200 router series is you can switch DS0 voice channels using just a T-1 or E-1 interface through a single port adapter. It’s also possible to switch between this and a 2 port version. This will allow DS0's to be switched back and forth through the Cisco 7200 VXR, without any additional processing required. This is a big deal, because this is a requirement in many current voice configurations. Right now you have the choice of either using the NPE-225, NPE-400 or NSE-1 processor with the Cisco 7200 router series.

The Cisco 7200 router series is a tool you can depend on when you are in need of scalability as well as density and are depending on a very wide range of connectivity options. For example, you can connect with ethernet 10BASE-T and 10BASE-FL as well is fast ethernet 100BASE-T (RJ-45 and MII) and even gigabit ethernet. You also have the option of connecting with token ring half or even full-duplex as well as different synchronous serial connections and multichannel connections you can use

By: Vincent A Rogers