With just a touch of hyperbole, Cisco Systems claims it has laid down the future of the Internet with its launch overnight of the CRS3, a heavy duty router for managing Internet traffic and capable f moving immense amounts of data at blinding speeds.
The CRS3 the letters stand for Carrier Routing System can shift data at up to 322 terabits per second, three times the speed of its predecessor, the CRS1, introduced in 2004.
According to Cisco that’s enough capacity to allow every man, woman and child in china to make a video call simultaneously; or to stream every movie ever created in less than four minutes.
US and global carrier AT&T said it had already conducted CRS3 trials, sending data traffic across its long-distance Internet backbone at 100 gigabits per second, 10,000 times faster than the average household cable or DSl connection.
According to Cisco, a single CRS3 could deliver a connection of 1 gigabit per second to nearly every home in San Francisco or any other major city in the world.
A beaming Cisco CEO John Chambers announced the new router at a wildly pre-hyped event, at 3am Sydney time, at which Cisco had promised it would “change the Internet forever”.
The router, which will mainly be sold to telcos and ISPs round the globe, will cost US$90,000. Cisco claims it has 12 times the capacity of the nearest rival equipment, provided by Juniper Networks.
But it’s not just the sheer capacity of the CRS3 that gives it its power to change the Net, said Pankaj Patel, Cisco senior veep, GM of its server provider business and genius behind development of the CRS3. It’s the intelligence built into it that enables it to direct traffic, based on priority of the data, and delivering an array of video, mobile, datacentre and cloud services via IP Next Generation Networks in the fastest possible time.
The announcement comes shortly after Google announced plans to build its own high-speed network in select communities in the USA.
Chambers paid tribute to Google as a great company, but said only a company like Cisco and its partners could put together the complex platforms needed to deal with the expected explosion in Internet services in coming years.
