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For what you are describing, I am not sure that the Cisco is the right choice.

This is a very small network with limited needs. You have not listed any needs that would require complicated routing, redundancy, or extreme uptime.

Cisco routers are powerfull tools which many times are only 30 percent utilized. Most likely in this office, 90 percent of the functions in the 1700 would never be touched.

Also, as a CCNP should not be able to come up with your own justifications?

I too have a soft spot for Cisco. However my clients looking for small remote office VPN links don't want to pay Cisco prices. I've been rolling out Zyxel kit for the past three years in all manner of solutions. It's not cheap - it's inexpensive - UK price wise ?160 per site for an ADSL endpoint that will handle 10 concurrent VPN tunnels. And - I'm not talking just pass-thro - these babies build and secure the tunnels as well.

In the far east Zyxel outsell Cisco in terms of quantity of VPN enabled routers - there must be a reason why our eastern cousins love them as much as we love Cisco - right ?

Now for the crunch... Zyxel have released a software tool that allows a central head office to remotely manage all the remote routers in one go - so you want to upgrade the firmware to 100 remote sites - easy. You want to change encryption keys - simple. You want to change your head office IP address - so so simple - set it up and hit go. Grab a coffee whilst it's doing it's stuff. It doesn't take long and the jobs done. Far easier than logging on to 100 remote routers one by one !!!

What model Fortinet do you have?
They all do routing. They all do PPTP and L2TP VPN and even IPSEC secure tunnels if you need to connect to a remote site (or you ARE a remote site and need to connect back to corporate).

You say T1 "equivalent", does that mean that you have a business DSL or something else that terminates in an ethernet connection and therefore doesn't require a CSU/DSU?

I'm curently pricing an etherpoint solution, once it's set up, the interenet connection will plug right into my Fortigate 400 and I'll power off the Cisco 2600 that is currently sitting in front of it.