Cisco Introduces a 322 Tbit/sec. Router 281
CWmike writes "Today Cisco Systems introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. 'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' Cisco's John Chambers said while announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said. The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the 'killer app,' Chambers said. Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.) AT&T said it has been using the CRS-3 to test 100Gbit/sec. data links in tests on a commercial fiber route in Florida and Louisiana."
"Library of Congresses"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps "Libraries of Congress"?
322 tb/s Without or Without... (Score:2, Interesting)
CIA/NSA software loaded to do deep packet inspection?
-Hack
Re:The question on everyone's mind (Score:5, Interesting)
Strangely, at $90,000 a pop, this strikes me as rather cheap. I wonder if that's a "rate limited" model so that you have to pay big bux more in order to get the full capacity?
Cables? (Score:4, Interesting)
What kind of wire would this router need? Is a single fibre cable enough for this kind of bandwidth? What is the limit of a fibre cable?
Too small a jump for a 6 years -- red flags! (Score:3, Interesting)
"At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004."
That was six years ago and we're only tripling the speed? Is it cheaper? Smaller?
Moore's law (which doesn't work in every way, but it certainly works for the computing processors in this thing) would suggest that this thing has a lot more CPU power than the CRS-1. (In six years we'd expect somewhere between 8 and 32 times the oomph.) And yet they only encumbered it with three times the bandwidth.
I'm worried that a lot more processor power is going into filtering. Cisco is one of the big anti-network neutrality advocates. They want to sell the machines to impose the rules.
If this machine isn't lower power or smaller or cheaper or just built incompetently, then the real story here isn't it's bandwidth -- it's its power for adjusting traffic for increased profits.
It runs QNX (Score:5, Interesting)
Like all Cisco high-end routers, it runs QNX Neutrino. The version used in these routers has a 12KB (not MB) microkernel. Almost all the packet handling is in FPGAs, but the supervision, error handling, etc. are in Cisco applications running on QNX Neutrino.
Internet and Internet 2 is smoke in the US of A (Score:5, Interesting)
In the States, we're playing on DSL lines that have 2Mb down, when they train up right (which they only do maybe 50% of the time) and other people are using Cable (Charter, Comlast, etc) and maybe that is 5 or maybe 10Mb down. If you are very lucky (and have the coin) maybe you are on AT&T uVerse or Verizon FIOS, and they could give you 100Mb, but you'd pay through the nose for it, and it would be asymmetrical. Most likely (the UVerse people I know) you are getting 10 down.
Now here comes Johnny Chambers saying this beast in the core could give GIG (1000Mb/s) to every person in San Francisco. Johnny's comb over is going to his brain. Just because a TR2N sized CRS-2 with enough horsepower to make the TRON MCP break down and cry comes into the provider core doesn't mean SHIT to you, the end user. Here in the states we won't see Japanese style connectivity for another 10 years. We're being left in the fucking stone age, because they money isn't there to build out past the core.
It pisses me off when Johnny tries to hype and pimp that stock price up, and they use multi-threading and distributed fabrics to get that speed, but we all know it's moving at snail's pace, the industry is consolidating, and unless you live where fiber is, forget it. And save me the "USA is so much bigger than Japan" argument, too. We don't see these speeds in our major cities, like NYC or Atlanta, SF or Chicago. Nothing even close. the SONET rings in these cities are still selling OC multiples at insane prices. It's still fucking 1996 in America.
Re:When do we consumers benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Palo Alto, heart of the Silicon Valley I was told. Fastest connection I can get (without having to take a 2nd mortgage, that is): 768 kbit/s. And, with a static IP, the same price as 9 years ago. WTF?!?
In the meantime, French ISPs are addressing complaints that 22 Mbit/s VDSL is a bit old-school by offering 100 Mbit/s FTTH [www.free.fr] (phone and TV included, of course), Japanese get Gigabit for ~60$/mo [auone-net.jp]...
AT&T, I'm glad you're upgrading your equipment at long last... Now when can I get better than 3rd-world connection?
Re:jaded, who care? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Internet and Internet 2 is smoke in the US of A (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It runs QNX (Score:2, Interesting)
yah QNX is really nice, drivers are running in used space so you can queue up redundant drivers against hardware, should a driver crash the driver in waiting can start up and take over even before the next packet comes. Kernel level instrumentation, no need to restart OS to restart drivers, lots of benefits. Anyway Ciscos have their own version of QNX 6 they have tailored for themselves..
Re:jaded, who care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Um lets see the big exchanges really are not that big generally once you go over x traffic to a certain tier you do a private interconnect exchanges are so that small companies can get into peering and away from transit. They also allow the tier 2 regionals the ability to interconnect.
There are some terrible connections but in the US tl least they are few and far between when your talking about long distance transit.Local loops are pretty ugly but at those low speeds (sub 100mbs) it's not that bad and it's ot like they culd I dnt know put some money into there outside plant every 50 years or so.
Greed there you have it, AT&T does not pay anybody for internet so it's just a question of getting it through there network. Pricing is direct greed I have had prices drop to 2% of initial offer there are not a lot of real costs to go with it the network pretty much costs x to run no matter how fast it goes.
Re:The question on everyone's mind - DPI (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The question on everyone's mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Library of Congresses"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Very true - to save money they are only open half the time - what half of the time naturally varies from post office to post office.
Re:The question on everyone's mind - DPI (Score:3, Interesting)
or if such massive hardware is going to sell more as a very fast deep packet inspection layer 7 device.
There is no way they would be able to do deep packet inspection at those kinds of speeds. Just think about a 1TB hard drive. Now imagine 300 of them. Now, you want to inspect all that data in 1 second. It's just not going to happen. That's why it's listed as a core router - it's job is to move a LOT of data as fast as possible. In fact, other routers do extra work to reduce the processing done by the core routers.