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Cisco unveiled a new router this week. So what? It’s true that most of the time the unveiling of a new router doesn’t elicit much more than a yawn from the technology community. But this time is different.
The new routing system promises to change the way we, and in fact, the entire world communicates. Sound like a little bit too much exaggeration? Well, this is how one New York Times writer described the announcement. “On Tuesday morning, as most of us in Silicon Valley ate breakfast, the Internet changed. The shift happened so quickly that it felt both jarring and stupendous at the same time.”
Cisco unveiled what it is calling the CRS-3 Carrier Routing System, which it describes as the foundation for the next-generation Internet.
What is so special about the system? For starters, consider this: Cisco claims it has the capacity to allow every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously. Every motion picture ever created could be streamed in less than four minutes. And, the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress can be downloaded in just over one second.
That’s pretty heady stuff. “It is all about bringing all these dreams and aspirations to life,” Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers said in announcing the system.
This latest big router, which will be primarily sold to large telecommunications companies like AT&T, is the next evolution of a product Cisco brought out in 2004 called the CRS-1. At the time, Chambers said people questioned whether such a powerful – and expensive - router would have much of a market. Since its introduction, Cisco has sold about 5,000 of the systems to 300 customers.
This time around not many people will be questioning the need for the CRS-3, which is currently in field trials. The system can handle about three times as much data as the CRS-1, or about 322 terabits per second.
New devices like the iPhone are already taxing telecommunications networks, and there is a pent-up demand to stream increasingly larger amounts of video. For a long time now, analysts predicted video phones would be standard in most homes and businesses, but the underlying infrastructure simply wasn’t there. With Cisco’s announcement, we’re a heck of a lot closer to reaching that breakthrough.
The Internet has changed, and it looks even more exciting.
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