Cisco has *plenty* of competitors: Extreme Networks (my favorite), Foundry Networks, Juniper Networks, Compatible Systems Corp., Marconi, to name a few.
Most places have much higher-end products than Cisco does. Cisco has very, very poor port densities on their border routers -- and if you want anything reasonable (other than ONE GigE port on a module!) you have to dish out $$. Meanwhile, places like Extreme offer more GigE ports than you could ever imagine using and at a much more reasonable price.
Cisco has a stronghold on the market indeed. Howerver, it is not because of their lack of competition -- it is because people are too mindless to try something new. They are brainwashed drones of marketing, and Cisco has the best marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
Cisco has *plenty* of competitors: Extreme Networks (my favorite), Foundry Networks, Juniper Networks, Compatible Systems Corp., Marconi, to name a few. Most places have much higher-end products than Cisco does. Cisco has very, very poor port densities on their border routers -- and if you want anything reasonable (other than ONE GigE port on a module!) you have to dish out $$. Meanwhile, places like Extreme offer more GigE ports than you could ever imagine using and at a much more reasonable price. Cisco has a stronghold on the market indeed. Howerver, it is not because of their lack of competition -- it is because people are too mindless to try something new. They are brainwashed drones of marketing, and Cisco has the best marketing.