WIC-BLANK-PANEL

WIC-BLANK-PANEL is a blanking panel or slot cover for Cisco equipment: blank WAN Interface Card Panel.

Blanking panels look like the most skippable item on an order and they are not. A chassis is designed around a defined airflow path, and an empty slot is a hole in it: air takes the easy route through the gap instead of across the cards, and the cards downstream of it run hotter than they were designed to. The result is not an immediate failure but thermal alarms and shortened component life. They also keep dust out of a slot you intend to populate later.

Three questions worth answering before any router purchase, whatever the model. What the throughput requirement actually is with your feature set enabled, rather than the datasheet figure measured without it. Whether the features you need are licensed as well as present, since on most platforms security and performance are separate entitlements. And how many slots or ports you will need in three years, because adding capacity is cheap and replacing a chassis is not.

Items in this class are the ones that hold up an installation, because they are specified last and nobody budgets lead time for them. If you are building out a chassis rather than replacing one part, let us check the whole list — the gaps are nearly always here rather than in the expensive items. Tell us the chassis and what is already fitted.

Green Code Technologies is a supplier of Cisco, and we supply Huawei and Juniper networking alongside HPE, Dell, Samsung, Netgear, Ubiquiti and Asus. We would rather tell you a part is no longer supported, or that we need to check it, than take an order for something that will not do what you need.