Catalyst C9300-48S

The switch features 48 x 1 Gigabit Ethernet SFP fiber downlink ports, each accepting standard 1G SFP transceivers including SX, LX, ZX optics as well as copper SFP units, making this model ideally suited for fiber-to-the-desk, secure government environments, and campus deployments where copper infrastructure is not present or preferred. A modular uplink slot accepts field-replaceable C9300-NM series network modules, enabling flexible scaling up to 100G without chassis replacement. The switch delivers 256 Gbps switching capacity standalone (736 Gbps stacked) with a forwarding rate of 190.47 million packets per second, backed by 8 GB DRAM, 16 GB flash, and a 16 MB packet buffer. StackWise-480 technology provides 480 Gbps stacking bandwidth, supporting up to eight switches in a single logical stack with NSF/SSO sub-50-ms failover protection. StackPower enables power pooling and distribution across stack members. The chassis includes three N+1 redundant field-replaceable fans and ships with a hot-swappable PWR-C1-715WAC power supply, with optional second supply for high availability.

Built on Cisco IOS XE and the UADP ASIC, the switch includes hardware-based AES-256 MACsec encryption, 802.1X authentication, Encrypted Traffic Analytics, and TrustSec. The platform supports 32,000 MAC addresses, 4,000 VLANs, 32,000 IPv4 routes, 16,000 IPv6 routes, and 9,198-byte jumbo frames. Available with perpetual Network Essentials (-E) or Network Advantage (-A) licenses, plus mandatory Cisco DNA subscriptions for SD-Access policy automation. The C9300-48S is ideal for campus access layers, secure government/defense networks, data center top-of-rack aggregation, and fiber-rich branch backbones requiring dense 1G SFP downlink connectivity with modular uplink flexibility.