14 DAY TRIAL // Cisco's much-hyped announcement is finally out and it looks like the big words were warranted, this thing will indeed "forever change the Internet." Or, then again, probably not. It's just a router, very surprising given that it's coming from Cisco, granted, but a router nonetheless. Actually a 'router system' and a behemoth, at that. The Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System is now Cisco's most powerful offering aimed at the biggest players in networking. It's three times as powerful as its predecessor, the CRS-1, and, the company says, 12 times as powerful as its closest competitor.
The networking company is making some big claims and, while it's all just marketing talk, there are some interesting stats in there. "The Cisco CRS-3 triples the capacity of its predecessor, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, with up to 322 Terabits per second, which enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; 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," the company touts in the press release.
Since most people in China don't even have a PC, all of them beginning to make video calls seems a bit unlikely. And every movie ever made being streamed online would give the Hollywood studios’ execs heart attacks. Moving past the marketing, though, there may be a real need for this beast, as Internet traffic continues to grow every year.
Granted, no fabled 'exa-flood' to lock up the interwebs is in sight, but the rise in demand for high-quality (and high-bandwidth) video, the growth of mobile devices online and the slow transition from desktop to cloud-based software are putting some strain on the existing infrastructure and things are only getting worse.
It's Cisco's job to create demand for networking hardware, so, of course, it's going to say that people are getting hungrier for bandwidth. But, while the 200 to 500 percent in traffic may prove to be exaggerated, it's clear that there is a demand and an inevitable growth in bandwidth consumption and the CRS-3 is one solution to fulfilling that demand.