Cisco is the dominant LAN switch vendor, both in the amount of ports it ships worldwide, and its revenue for switch ports sold. One common industry assumption is that Cisco gear is high-priced, but worth the investment for the company's quality support and advanced features. Another assumption is that Cisco switches are just plain overpriced.

But comparing overall LAN switch port prices - based on figures from Synergy Research Group - Cisco is not that much more costly than some of its high-performance competitors. On a price-per-port basis, it's not even the most expensive. Force10 Networks, at $513 per port, is the priciest switch vendor; more than half of Force10's revenue is from 10G Ethernet switch port sales. The second-most expensive switches per port are from Foundry at $162 per port. Cisco is third at $124 per port, followed by Extreme at $113. Enterasys, Alcatel and Nortel cost $89, $88 and $80 per port. The cheapest brands are Netgear ($4), D-Link ($5) and Cisco's Linksys ($6).

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While Cisco may be associated with high-end products and price, its lower-end gear is among the most expensive. If you're in the market for a fixed-configuration box - usually a stackable wiring closet switch for connecting end users or maybe a rack of servers - Cisco is not your cheapest bet. The company had the highest per-port price for fixed-configuration switches (a superset of Layer 2 and 3, Fast, Gigabit and 10G speeds) at $73 per port. Extreme was second at $72 and Alcatel was third at $48.

However, Cisco is also hedging on the low end of the market, as its Linksys switch brand sold for around $7 per port - third-cheapest among the company's tracked by Synergy Research Group.

Even in the higher-end category of modular switching, Cisco was still fifth among its peers in price per port, at around $300. Force10, Foundry, Extreme and Alcatel were the respective one through four). Only when you start narrowing down categories to high-end features, such as Gigabit, Layer 3 modular ports, does Cisco make the top three in most expensive; it's $388 per-port price for Gigabit Layer 3 modular ports was behind Nortel's $421, and Force10's $462.

(Keep in mind that market figures from Synergy Research Group, or other analyst firms, use switch sales and shipment numbers provided by vendors; these numbers typically represent transactions between the vendors and resellers, distributors, and value-added resellers. Whether getting a low-end switch from BestBuy or having a backbone core router installed by IBM Global Services or EDS, buyers will see a retail markup.)