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Cisco 4000 Is the Gold Standard for Small/medium Office Telephony Needs
June 30, 2022

Cisco 4000 Is the Gold Standard for Small/medium Office Telephony Needs

Matt Rathbun | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000)

We use the routers in my organization primarily as voice gateways. Many of our locations still use legacy PRI (serial/copper) handoffs from our vendors and we need a gateway in order to receive the connections. The other primary function that they serve is to be the coordinator for SRST for our Cisco phones. If the phones lose connection to Call Manager, the ISR4300s we have will take over call routing duties so our office can continue to receive calls even though they have been isolated from the subscribers. At some of our smaller locations, we also use them for some basic core routing functionality. They are certainly capable of handling all of the duties in one appliance and are a good value.
  • Voice gateway
  • SRST coordinator
  • Core routing
  • DHCP server
  • Cumbersome to build/spec
  • Uncertain support future
  • No legacy module support
  • Voice interface for telephony vendors
  • Survivability for corporate phones
  • 911 access in emergencies
  • Core routing
  • Positive impact through SRST allowing office to receive customer calls in a LAN outage
  • Positive impact through core routing functionality and no need for additional equipment
  • Consistent hardware has eased deployment
  • Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) and Cisco 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 1000)
The ISR routers offer a significant cost advantage over the ASR line of products. The ISR products are designed for smaller businesses that don't have the telephony needs of a large enterprise. Price is definitely the reason we went with this class of equipment. Beyond price, the biggest reason we selected Cisco as opposed to other vendors is the native functionality with Cisco Call Manager. SRST is a function that only works on Cisco equipment. Because it offers a business advantage by allowing us to receive customer calls, in an SD-WAN outage, we never really considered a different vendor. It was simply too big of a future to ignore.

Do you think Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) again?

Yes

I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a voice gateway device for a small to medium office environment that included 100 to 500 people. This is where we have these devices deployed and they work very well for that purpose. They provide SRST for Cisco Phones and are robust enough to handle core routing and DHCP services if needed. Because they are able to accept many different modules, the flexibility at the telephone edge makes them ideal for consistency in base hardware. They are easy to configure and licensing is less problematic than other Cisco devices. Although they can be cumbersome to design from scratch, Cisco has many "bundled" options that include purpose-built hardware, especially in the voice realm. For what they do, they are relatively inexpensive compared to other Cisco options.