Cisco purchases for dummies

I have a modest Cisco Small Business Router C850 series router for over two years now, and I’m fairly happy about it. However when I tried to find IPv6 commands on it, I stumbled upon things like “what’s this ipv6 thing you’re talking about?”. Ignorant as I am about these things, I figured out on Cisco.com that the 850 series doesn’t support IPv6 in general. So when I finally decided to get a 1841, I guessed that it would support it out of the box.

The thing about Cisco is that they’re selling their operating system IOS under different versions and feature sets. And the standard 1841-BASE feature set, doesn’t know anything but simple IPv4 routing.

When you do some research via comparing these feature sets on the feature navigator you can conclude that only the Feature sets: Adv. Enterprise Services and Adv. IP Services actually contain IPv6 capabilities. Neither IP Base or Advanced Security has IPv6.

Being a simple consumer with no real way to upgrade my license or software, I had to buy a new 1841 with Adv. IP Services, which is about 1000 euro’s more than the standard model.