1.5 Assembling and Cabling WAN Components
1.5.3 Branch office router equipment
When selecting a branch office router, typical Cisco solutions include the following:
  •  Cisco 1600 series
  •  Cisco 1700 series
  •  Cisco 2500 series
  •  Cisco 2600 series

Cisco 1600 Series

The Cisco 1600 series routers connect small offices with Ethernet LANs to the public Internet, and to a company's internal intranet or corporate LAN through several WAN connections such as ISDN, asynchronous serial, and synchronous serial. All Cisco 1600 series models include one or two Ethernet ports, and one WAN interface card expansion slot for additional connectivity and flexibility.

Cisco 1700 Series  

The Cisco 1700 router is a small, modular desktop router that links small- to medium-size remote Ethernet and FastEthernet LANs over one to four WAN connections to regional and central offices.

Cisco 2500 Series

The Cisco 2500 series routers provide a variety of models that are designed for branch office and remote site environments. These routers are typically fixed-configuration with at least two of the following interfaces: Ethernet, Token Ring, synchronous serial, ISDN BRI, and Hub.

Cisco 2600 Series

The Cisco 2600 series is a family of modular access routers that offer network managers and service providers an attractively priced remote branch office solution, providing the versatility needed to adapt to changes in network technology as new services and applications become available. With full support of the Cisco IOS software, the Cisco 2600 series modular architecture provides the power to support the advanced Quality of Service (QoS), security, and network-integration features that are required in today's evolving enterprise and service provider networks.

It is important to choose the router that supports the WAN protocols and interfaces you will use. For example, the 1600 series router and the respective WAN interface card is an example of a branch office router that will support the interfaces required in the network topology illustrated in the “Network Overview” section.

The router in the Figure is a Cisco 1603 router with the appropriate serial WAN interface card used for a Frame Relay connection. A 1720 router is also available to perform similar functions. The 1720 router has two available WAN interface card slots. Use one slot for the serial WAN interface card and the other slot for an Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN) Basic Rate Interface (BRI) WAN interface card.