Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System (Source: Cisco)
New network technology should be able to power an incredible online future
The internet forever changed how we live our daily lives. However, an oft forgotten story in its success is the tireless advances in network infrastructure that allowed a massive amount of data to be delivered to home connections in such a short amount of time.
That pace does not look to be slowing, with Cisco announcing today its new CRS-3 Carrier Routing System (CRS). The new internet "backbone" directs traffic at total transmission speeds of up to 322 Tbps. That's over three times the speed of the Cisco's previous offering, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, and according to the company, twelve times as fast as closest competitive offering.
Cisco offered some stunning examples of how that speed could be put to use. They say that it would allow "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 has poured over $1.6B USD into developing its CRS products and currently it claims that there are over 5,000 CRS-1 units active in the wild. Cisco announced that one of its customers, AT&T has become the first to trial CRS-3 powered internet in the U.S. The AT&T trial deployment powered AT&T's service corridor spanning from New Orleans to Miami.
The new networking hardware is powered by Cisco's hexa-core QuantumFlow Array Processors, which it claims are 60 percent more power efficient than the closest competition. They employ smart traffic routing, IPv6, and increased support for cloud computing virtual private networks (VPNs).
Even as key players in the wireless industry race to put more data in our palms faster, the CRS-3 update should help PC internet stay relevant. With the speed it provides a wealth of online video and advanced HTML5, Silverlight, JavaFX, and Flash content should be possible. Also, new standards such as 3D web content may soon be possible thanks to the faster transmission speeds.
