Cisco Switching

Switching is the part of a network that quietly determines whether everything else works, and it's a place where Cisco has earned its reputation as the gold standard over decades. Their gear runs in essentially every datacenter on earth, and the CCNA is the baseline certification the whole industry measures networking skill against. They are, frankly, the best in the world at what they do. The licensing can be a headache — we'll get to that — but the hardware and the track record are unmatched.

Here's how we use their lineup, from the bottom up.

Unmanaged Switches

We rarely deploy unmanaged switches. They have no VLANA logical segment on a physical switch that isolates traffic between device groups — separate networks without extra hardware. support, no management, and no visibility — fine for a few devices on a bench, but they have no place in infrastructure we're responsible for. Almost any real environment is better served by managed switching.

Catalyst 1200

The Catalyst 1200 is our pick for the most cost-sensitive sites: a single switch, no need for stackingConnects multiple physical switches so they operate as a single logical switch with one management interface, one configuration, and shared MAC and IP address tables., and a tight budget. It's a capable managed switch at an entry price. It doesn't offer multi-gigabit uplinks for wireless, so it isn't the switch for a high-end access point deployment — but where one switch covers the whole site, it can be the right call.

Catalyst 1300

The Catalyst 1300 is the workhorse, and it's in most of the network stacks we build. It's managed, reliable, supports the VLANs and PoEDelivers DC power over an Ethernet cable alongside data, eliminating the need for a separate power outlet at devices like IP phones, access points, and security cameras. and uplinks a real office needs, and it's priced so it doesn't blow up a project budget. It does multi-gigabit uplinks, though only up to 5 Gbps — enough for most wireless, but short of the 10 Gbps the highest-density access points can use. When someone asks what switch we put in, the honest answer most of the time is the 1300.

The line has a long pedigree, descending from the CBS350, the SG350X, and the SG300 before it — years of reliable, inexpensive small-business switches. (The Catalyst 1300 was itself known as the Cisco Business 1300 until Cisco folded the small-business line under the Catalyst name.) We still see SG300s running in the field today, dependable for what they cost. That track record is a big part of why we trust the current generation.

Catalyst 9000

When the environment is genuinely enterprise — high port density, redundancy that can't blink, multi-gigabit uplinks to wireless — we move to the Catalyst 9300 and 9500. Their ports negotiate 1, 2.5, 5, and 10 Gbps and deliver more power per port than the small-business line, which is what high-end wireless and PoE devices increasingly need.

When the reliability justifies the budget, these are the switches we reach for — as we did for a leading NYC architecture firm and across Little Island.

Lineage and Licensing

Cisco's small-business heritage traces back through the Linksys era — the affordable, reliable line that evolved into today's Catalyst 1200 and 1300. Its cloud-managed path runs separately through Meraki, the acquisition that became Cisco's browser-managed platform. Two philosophies under one roof: switching you configure directly, and switching you administer from the cloud.

At the top end, Cisco hardware does the heavy lifting of the internet itself — the switching and routing inside major datacenters and cloud providers, and the gear that carries traffic between regions. The same engineering discipline runs all the way down to a 1300 in a ten-person office.

The one real gripe is licensing. Cisco's tiers and subscriptions can be confusing and, at the enterprise level, expensive — the tax you pay for the ecosystem, and for most clients well worth it. From one switch in a closet to a redundant core moving traffic across a building, the discipline doesn't change: match the tier to the job, get the licensing right, and let the hardware disappear into years of quiet reliability. That's the substance of our network engineering and network infrastructure design work.