Replacing Cisco Business 250, 350 and Catalyst 1000 switches

What Cisco has announced

Cisco's end-of-sale notices, with the dates that matter:

Cisco's switch pages no longer list the Cisco Business 250 or 350; the Catalyst 1200 and 1300 sit in their place under "Small business and LAN compact". New CBS250, CBS350 and Catalyst 1000 units are no longer in Cisco's price list (8 Nov 2026), so new orders are for the replacements below. Existing switches keep Cisco support until the last date of support.

Which replacement range: Catalyst 1200 or 1300?

• Cisco Business 250 to Catalyst 1200: smart-managed switches for small offices, the like-for-like successor in Cisco's migration tables.
• Cisco Business 350 and Catalyst 1000 to Catalyst 1300: fully managed switches with stacking and layer 3 features, and multigigabit and 10G models.

Port counts, PoE and uplinks carry over in most cases: a CBS250-24P-4G maps to a C1200-24P-4G, a CBS350-48FP-4X to a C1300-48FP-4X. The Catalyst 1200 vs 1300 page compares the two ranges.

Cisco Business 250 (CBS250) replacements

One row per model; Cisco sells each one with regional suffixes (for example -BR, -IN or -KR), all covered by the same replacement:

For the partial-PoE (PP) models Cisco lists no migration product; the full-budget PoE+ Catalyst 1200 model with the same port count is our suggestion.

Cisco Business 350 (CBS350) replacements

For the CBS350-24NGP-4X and CBS350-8MP-2X Cisco lists no migration product; the multigigabit Catalyst 1300 MGP models are our suggestion. They have fewer or slower multigigabit ports: the CBS350-24NGP-4X has 8 x 5GE ports and the C1300-24MGP-4X 8 x 2.5GE; the CBS350-8MP-2X has 8 x 2.5GE and the C1300-8MGP-2X 4 x 2.5GE plus 4 x GE (Cisco's descriptions). Contact us if you need 5GE ports or more 2.5GE ports and we will suggest the model.

Catalyst 1000 replacements

Cisco says some Catalyst 1000 parts have "no replacement product", including the Fast Ethernet (C1000FE) models; the gigabit Catalyst 1300 model with the same port count is our suggestion for those.

Planning the swap

• Check the PoE budget: replacement models have their own PoE budgets; check yours with the PoE budget guide before ordering.
• Uplinks and optics: 4G models have 1G SFP uplinks and 4X models 10G SFP+; existing transceivers may carry over, and the Cisco transceivers page lists current codes.
• Configuration: VLANs and port settings need moving to the new switches; we can stage them before they reach site.
• No licence needed: the Catalyst 1200 and 1300 do not need a separate software subscription.

How to order

How ordering works. Press Add next to a part number and it goes into your basket; where a subscription or support contract goes with the hardware, you choose it in the same step. Then View basket and Request a quote. We check every line, quantity and term against your sites and send back a personalised quote by email. Nothing is charged online. We can also design, supply, stage, install and configure the equipment, with the scope confirmed at quote (see network installation).