Cisco Systems announced the Cisco 2600 series, a new family of cost-effective, modular access routers. The modular design of the Cisco 2600 series enables customers to adopt future technologies and scale to accommodate network expansion, protecting customers` technology investments. "The Cisco 2600 series reinforces our commitment to add multiservice voice/data integration capabilities to our product portfolio, thus enabling our customers to control cost and allowing service providers to offer broader managed service options. The deployment of the Cisco 2600 series will allow companies to consolidate the functions of multiple separate devices into a single, compact package that can be managed remotely," says Dean Lane, Systems Engineer, Cisco SA. The Cisco 2600 series extends the versatility, integration and power of the Cisco 3600 series to smaller, remote branch offices and complements the industry-leading Cisco 2500 series, Cisco`s most cost-effective solution for mission-specific, branch office data requirements. With the introduction of the Cisco 2600 series, Cisco now offers a broad range of packet telephony gateway solutions. Enables New Business Applications, Reduces Costs The Cisco 2600 series is a key component of Cisco`s data/voice/video integration strategy, enabling corporate customers to consolidate data, voice and video traffic to reduce costs, deploy new business applications and improve network performance. Cisco 2600 series users can use voice/fax modules, first introduced for the Cisco 3600 series in October, to take advantage of new applications including Internet telephony, Web-based call centers and desktop video. By deploying the Cisco 2600 series as customer premises equipment (CPE), service providers can offer broader managed service options including integrated voice and data, virtual private networks (VPNs) and outsourced dial access services. With support for multimedia, IP, serial and SNA traffic, the Cisco 2600 series enables large cost savings by eliminating the need for duplicate networks. Investment Protection; Lower Cost of Ownership The Cisco 2600 series shares modular interfaces with Cisco`s 1600 and 3600 series products, enabling customers and service providers to leverage and protect their investments in modular components that can be used in small, mid-sized and regional branch offices. Components are field-upgradable, enabling customers to easily change network interfaces in the future as new services are deployed without performing "forklift upgrades" of their entire remote branch office solutions. The Cisco 2600 series` new Advanced Integration Module (AIM) slot further protects the customer`s investment by offering an upgrade path to hardware-assisted data compression, data encryption and other advanced services in the future. The Cisco 2600 series lowers the cost of ownership by integrating the functions of CSU/DSUs, ISDN Network Termination 1 (NT1) devices and other equipment found in remote branch office wiring closets in a single, compact unit. Extranet/VPN Access, Dial Services Modular in design, interface configurations for the Cisco 2600 series are easily customized to accommodate a wide variety of network applications including secure extranet or VPN access and departmental dial services. When used in conjunction with the recently announced Cisco AS5800 carrier-class access concentrator, the Cisco 2600 series provides cost-effective termination of outsourced dial access services on the customer premises. Simplified Voice Management Cisco Voice Manager is a Java-based application that simplifies the process of deploying and managing end-to-end voice-enabled networks. It works with the Cisco 2600 series to provide unique capabilities for monitoring and managing end-to-end multiservice networks. Cisco Voice Manager takes the complexity out of large voice-over-IP networks by simplifying the process of configuring voice and fax interfaces and administering the voice dial plan. Cisco Voice Manager provides Call Detail Records, Call Volume Reports and Active Call Reports, and measures quality of service (QoS) parameters such as delay, packet loss and type of service. The Cisco 2600 series also can be managed remotely using network management applications such as CiscoWorks and CiscoView. The Cisco Voice Manager also supports the voice-enabled Cisco 3600 series.
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