Cisco gear is expensive because it is expensive to design and expensive to manufacture equipment that can shuttle frames between multiple OC-192 circuits at sub-millisecond speeds across a purpose-built backplane that won't lock up under the load, and because it is even more expensive to design the software that will manage the forwarding databases on that equipment under the strain of multiple global routing table updates every second without ever hiccupping, and because for all that effort, you can count the number of US companies that will buy that kind of a product in any real volume on two hands.

It's a weird argument about the scarcity of bandwidth that suggests that it's all a price fixing scam by Cisco. Cisco, for what it's worth, does not make the majority of its money on big-ass backbone routers.

It is, in fact, rather akin to the idea that Southwest Airlines tickets cost $200 because Boeing has artificially inflated the price of the 737.