Its main disadvantage is that it runs only on Cisco equipment, which may lead to an organization being Vendor lock-in to this vendor.

But then the company's stock price fell when telecommunications and Internet companies ran into problems and investors worried they would cut their orders for Cisco equipment.

It is used to share information about other directly connected Cisco equipment, such as the operating system version and IP address.

Alcatel already distributes about $200 million of Cisco equipment a year.

The CCIE certifies the skills required of network engineers to plan, operate and troubleshoot complex, converged network infrastructures on a wide variety of Cisco equipment.

Linux and BSD can establish ad-hoc IP over GRE tunnels which are interoperable with Cisco equipment.

In 2008, it was reported that an international operation uncovered $76 million worth of fake Cisco equipment, such as routers, switches and network cards, being trafficked between the United States, Canada, and China.

The company's plan to build a 20,000-mile telecom network was financed by, among others, Cisco Systems, which invested $200 million in the company and lent it an additional $285 million to help buy Cisco equipment.

Eventually, SNS sold 3Com, Wellfleet, and finally, Cisco equipment.

On Cisco equipment, both traffic policing and shaping are implemented through the token bucket algorithm.