Depends on what configuration - I've seen 1U smaller ARS1K's for $15-25K - big carrier grade ones can easily exceed $100K - all depends on the number of ports and interfaces supported...
The ASR1K series is a scalable family that share a lot of common elements...
We use a ton of ASR1001-X (used to use 1002 and 1004 until they went EOL), amazing little router for 1RU, and our pricing is extremely reasonable. Sadly, they just went end of sale (the non-X have been end of sale for quite a while and most models are end of support now too). Cisco is pushing us toward the Cat8k which is this weird all in one L2/L3 switch, router, firewall, SDWAN, etc. The 1G capable model has tested out well and we'll be using that to replace the ISR 4K series, but the 10G one that was supposed to replace the ASR is junk, so we have to start from scratch and test a higher end cat8k now.
Their solution - in the interim use the ASR1001-HX. Another even more amazing router, but at $45k with our discount (even more if you want lots of crypto or the full 80G throughput) it is not reasonable.
None of the 1K series are over 100k but I don't see list prices only our pricing. The 9k can get up there easily though especially with 40G and 100G interfaces, we use those in our POPs. Massive throughput.
The ISR 4k and ASR 1k have been excellent CPE routers for us, I certainly hope the Cat8k proves to be as good.
The most amazing thing about Cisco gear is the depreciation. Worse than cars, stereo gear, really anything else I've ever seen. Something that cost several hundred K, 3-5 years later is worth a few hundred bucks on ebay if you're lucky. I rescue some from e-waste (for my own lab use, can't resell as the serial numbers are tied to our account), but it is sad to see pallets and pallets of millions of dollars of gear headed to the shredder. And we PAY for them to take it from us (well in reality we pay for people with security clearance to wipe and then thoroughly destroy them, but still).
I love their new licensing model (well I guess it isn't that new anymore) - we'll send you a router capable of x gigs of throughput, with a hardware crypto card in it, but if you want that performance, you need to pay to install a license and unlock it. Of course, at home, I just install the trial license which converts to "right to use" after 30 days and works forever. Not worried about them coming to audit me.
Same model many luxury cars are going with now, you want heated seats, just subscribe to that feature for a monthly fee, the hardware is already there
Side note - in fairness there are perfectly good reasons to run an L2 tunnel using the ASR. It supports MACSEC+ and can do some really massive throughput at L2 with full line rate encryption. We don't do tunnels over the internet, it is over a private routed MPLS network, but same idea as doing it over the internet. Software bridging/switching, well that's just stupid and useless on an ASR, it will max out the CPU and totally cripple the throughput (there are switch cards available for it with ASICs, but they're for some pretty limited and specific uses). Of course there are a lot of "experts" on DSLreports that really have no clue what they're talking about, so who really knows what the actual story was. The whole setup being discussed sounds a bit of a cluster fork.
www.dslreports.com
