The award-winning Cisco Catalyst 5500 is the most flexible, feature-rich switch in the industry. With a gigabit architecture that scales throughput to millions of packets per second, the Catalyst is ideal for high-density wiring closets. Advanced multilayer features provide the intelligence needed to support mission-critical applications by delivering end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and multicast support.The Cisco Catalyst 5500 is the company's modular switching platform for high-density wiring closets or distribution points. As a wiring closet solution, the Catalyst 5500 supports high-density, dedicated Token Ring or 10/100/1000 Ethernet switching. The Catalyst 5500 also supports all advanced Cisco wiring closet features such as automatic protocol broadcast filtering to conserve valuable bandwidth, intelligent multicast forwarding to handle multimedia traffic, and load balancing over redundant links.