Technology Marches On

[bobbymike]

From Space Daily

Cisco unveils system for super-fast Internet

by Staff Writers
San Francisco (AFP) March 9, 2010
Cisco Systems on Tuesday unveiled super-fast Internet hardware that promises to boost US competitiveness and bolster economic recovery by moving mountains of data at astounding speeds.
The leader in networking equipment said its new router "triples the capacity of its predecessor," and "enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second."

The system also would enable "every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes," Cisco said.

The new Cisco hardware is for the backbones of telecom firms and other Internet service providers that will be able to vastly ramp up the amount of data they handle and how fast it travels.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Cisco_unveils_system_for_super-fast_Internet_999.html

 

[mz]

What is it? A router?
What is new? It's fast? How fast (please no libraries of congress or double decker buses)? What is the capability?

The article fails to provide basic information on what exactly Cisco has done.

 

[TomS]

It's a new backbone router for carrying Internet traffic at the Tier-1 providers -- essentially supercomputers optimized for nothing but passing data packets along a network. They're talking about 322 Tbps, but that's in a configuration with 72 of these routers ganged together. Realistic network setups will be slower than that, but still a whole lot faster than the current generation, albeit not as fast as others that are still in the works. This is evolutionary, not revolutionary.