Brisbane City Council network manager Eric Bradley said Cisco is becoming "pretty aggressive" with its end-of-life program and a lot of products are being phased out.

Cisco announced last week it will stop selling 2600 series routers on March 27, 2007 and support for the devices is scheduled to end on March 25, 2012.

"It's disappointing that a product which costs an absolute fortune can be phased out so quickly," Bradley said, adding it is going to end-of-life a product and cut support a "couple of years" after its last 2600 purchase.

The council has about 1000 routers spread across some 200 sites and while most 2600 series have been upgraded to the 2800 models, a few still remain.

"Networking is at the lower end of the budgetary cycle and at about A$5500 (US$4,000) for current 2800 models the hardware and software is expensive," Bradley said. "You also have to buy the IOS software. Like Microsoft, they make money out of it."