Cisco promised us a significant announcement this morning, one that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments," so we had to tune in to the company's webcast to find out what it was all about. We were instantly bowled over with the shocking news that video is
the killer app of the future internet, before getting it drilled into our heads that we really need, like and want more bandwidth. No kidding -- so what, Cisco, what is your revolutionary next step? Is it the
space-based IP router? Some killer
alternative 4G connectivity? Well, it turns out it was the CRS3. The what? Cisco is bringing out a new Carrier Routing System, which Pantaj Patel describes as "huge" in a perfect monotone. We couldn't agree more. Apparently Cisco is keen on offering smarter pipes, and we did hear that AT&T is handling 19 petabytes of traffic each and every day, but the sum of the whole thing is that Cisco is just refreshing its backhaul hardware and regurgitating promises about
100Gbps bandwidth and whatnot. The internet remains safe and un-revolutionized for another day. Video after the break.
posted March 9th 2010 11:36AM
If it delivers, it's no worse than the present. That's an achievement as well, depending from your point of view.
@Wekkel Yeah, I don't know why Engadget is ragging on this. If you watch the video, it clearly details how the CSR3 is saving the rain forests. What the hell has Engadaget done to save the earth lately?
@(Unverified)
How does network hardware save the rainforest - are competing products made of illegal hardwood or do they require a constant feed of rainforest wood to fuel them?
My job and about 2,000 shares of stock disapprove. All hail Cisco.
@rock99rock
I was thinking just this myslef when I saw your post.
The bottom line here is that applications and data will rapidly expand so as to fill any and all available bandwidth.
It has always been this way. The more you have, the more you use.
I'm sure this will lead to massively faster and cheaper internet access for the masses.
....
@UnixSystemsEngineer And that's why you're a UnixSystemsEngineer and not a datacenter architect.
I'll go ahead and download the library of congress in one second
@senormatt yeah, why are we still comparing the speed to library of congress? From 4 seconds to 1 second, great. How about to start using bigger datasets for these comparison purposes?
Juniper announced a core router with twice the density of the CRS-3 last month:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=187544
I think that took the wind out of Cisco's sails.
@macemoneta That's great...but do they have a snazzy video like Cisco?
Pure marketing genius....I especially like the part @1:10 - just about wet myself :)
"Here… see how the line rate 14 port 10Gig-E module achieves a wire rate throughput giving the CRS-3 the industry’s highest 10Gig-E port density in a single system rack"
@macemoneta Then again, it's not like you can really believe either one's faceplate marketing until you have it in a lab and test it yourself.
@diamondsw Well, if you're gonna test them, then all bets are off. You're lucky if they power up when they arrive. The only time they reach 80% of their stated functionality is at the end-of-life date.
Enough throughput to download the entire library of congress in 1.2 seconds - that’s really pretty incredible. Too bad ISPs like TimeWarner and Comcast still have pretty solid monopolies in most areas, and neither of them seem to be too interested in investing money to upgrade their network infrastructure.
My “HD” channels are a grainy mess of highly compressed blur and I can barely stream a 480P YouTube video during peak hours.
@twitmer *sigh* so how much is enough for Comcast and Time Warner to spend for the upgrades you want? $10 more a month to you? $20?
Seriously, both companies spend BILLIONS, that's with a "B" dude, on upgrading HSD infrastructure. I'm not sure you understand that no matter how much faster you make something, people will eat it up. That is until you start making them pay for the "all you can eat", then suddenly they realize, "I don't really need unlimited power for the price of a house payment HSD I guess after all".
@dataninja My monthly cable bill is $130 ($ 50 Data / $80 TV) and spend an extra $15 a month for their “Turbo” internet package. That means in the ten years that I’ve been a customer they’ve made over $15,000 on me. Start multiplying that by the number of subscribers they have on a given block/neighborhood/city… and billion dollar upgrades start to seem a bit more affordable.
I understand that there are plenty of customers who are happy with 3MB Down/512K Up broadband and poor HD signal… I’m just not one of them. It’s bad enough that I have to buy a 200 channel bundle to get the 12 channels I watch, but when those 12 channels don’t even look good – it starts to irritate me.
When I pay for an HD channel , I want HD.
When I pay for a high-speed internet, I want high-speed (and not just at 3AM)
Providers in other countries have managed to provide better service at lower prices. The US is lagging behind in both broadband speed/coverage and no amount of innovation by Cisco is going to change things unless we get some real competition between Cable Providers/ISPs.
@twitmer You should start by getting rid of the $15/mo turbo boost ripoff.
What can they do, if every teenager in America must post their pointless rants on youtube? If Google could improve the transmission/compression/bandwidth requirements on its videos even by 1%, that would amount to a lot in the long run.
I fear the next time Cisco invites people to witness the unveiling of a new product that will 'forever change the internet', only my Uncle Ernie and his pet monkey will come. And only while the free coffee lasts.
@(Unverified) There was free coffee?!!! Dammit...
Do we really need that much porn?
Yes we do!
Its a sad fact that businesses the world over see Cisco as the sole company to go to for networking gear, kind of like how IBM were 30-40 years ago.
We are an all Cisco networking site, and to say its crap, with dropped connections left right and centre, poor throughput, etc, would be an understatement.
Plus our last bill to Cisco, with our 'special relationship' totalled several million pounds what with our supposed state of the art network infrastructure upgrade!
Don't even begin to think about how crap and expensive Ciscos NAP system is - we're getting that too in a few months time.
@Heliosphan I've got to bite on this...
I work at a pretty major deployment and the Cisco gear we have is steady as a rock. Performance is excellant too.
If you are really seeing dropped connections, decent engineers should be able to resolve these issues.
@cjl224 Amen. If you know what you're doing, these things are as solid as can be. The performance isn't always the absolute best (e.g., blade-based FWSM performance at the moment horribly lags their ASA firewall line), but the reliability is untouched.
@Heliosphan Packet loss on a Cisco device? Sounds like a bunch of incompetents running your network.
@Heliosphan
As the others have stated, the person running your network is a boob. Get someone who knows how to properly design/engineer a network, then speak of how it works. I work for a Cisco partner and I rarely have any issues with any if their equipment.
Design is likely the culprit, I see poorly designed networks all the time that can take great equipment to its knees. Kinda like poorly coded programs, they run like crap even on the best systems.
well. that test is "only" showing 139 gigabits or .14 Terrabits, I would like to see the "scaled" version :)
still at 17 gigs per second, you can download alot of library of congresseses.
now only if we had fiber to every house :)
You know about 10 years ago, most of us lot living in England were still on dial-up and very jealous of the US broadband internet infrastructure, now it seems the UK and most of Europe and the world are overtaking you guys on Speed and especially pricing... what gives ?
@Firesuite Not in Belgium :-(
@Firesuite
Two things, land mass and population.
UK = 243,610 square km and about 62,041,708 people
US = 9,826,675 square km and about 308,831,000 people
Even though we have a lot more area to upgrade, I am getting 12Mbps down / 1.5Mbps up in the Midwest and I am pretty happy with the speeds and I pay $45 a month. My town is also asking Google to provide 1Gbps Internet in our area.
@Genicus
+1
@mnemonicj
US population density is 50% higher than Sweden, at 20.7 persons/square km (US figure is 31.9) and still i pay around 19$ for a 100/100mbit connection
I would seriously be mad if i had to pay 45$ for 12Mbit
I want Ellen Page to install my CRS3. You get me her, and I'm sold.
@captainpease +1 (And I'm 43...dirty old man...)
I thought Cisco died in "Dances With Wolves"?
@FrankJ
I think you mean 1Mbps, unless you are referring to millibits and no megabits.
@rock99rock Why the hell did average people think that an announcement from Cisco was going to affect them? Do you have Cisco gear in your house (Cisco, not Linksys)? No. You do not care about things like BGP, OSPF, spanning tree, and you're not in the market for tens of gigabits of throughput. However, those of us who run the datacenters and pipes that run your "internet" are damn pleased.
What, do you think "cloud computing" means no one has to run large, expensive datacenters that need TONS of bandwidth, both externally and internally?
@rederikus You can say the same about pretty much everything from PCs to other products. People talk how great ASUS netbooks are for 14 hours on battery use... who cares, it's expected, right?
My point is, this is big and great achievement to increase the bandwidth 3x and decrease the power consumption. Great job Cisco
I was hoping they'd just redo IP7 so that it made more sense to everyone that has the misfortune of trying IP6 (instead of just disabling it). Just add 2 or 3 more octets to the format IP4 uses. Anything with all 0's for the first few octets would be routed as IP4, everything else would be routed as IP7. Or was that just too simple of a solution?
@boe
Cisco doesn't understand IP4, IP6 or IP7.
IPv4, IPv6 and IPv7 on the other hand...
@boe
Well IPv6 isn't that bad from a little experience that i have it just need to spend some time. Actually if designed properly it makes more sense than the chaos that IPv4 may create.
Btw where did you heard about IPv7? Or that was a wishful thinking? I found a proposal for IPv7 but nothing more.
Wow that was it? When they said it will forever change the internet I let my mind fly with all kind of wild ideas. Hell the wildest one was a Cisco/Google merge Cisgle. Well I guess the guy/girl that came with that line has a nice bonus check to deposit.
2 Words.... Cable Management.
You think if you were going to make a video like that you would at least organize your fiber cables so that they aren't hanging all over.
@Jaylittles531
I have seen WAY WAY worse, actually in that video they seem pretty neat :)
@Sor1
I've seen worse too. If thats neat to you, you should see what my closets look like.
@rock99rock Ironically, there is a book titled the "Shit List", and the sequel is called "CRS: Can't Remember Shit"
@rock99rock
I think it was a bit presumptuous to say it "Will change the internet" but it's really the news and blogs that blew that out of proportion. We were thinking that they were going to revolutionize the end user experience when they were revolutionizing the backend.
In Cisco's defense this really is huge news 322Tbps is hella fast (well terra- fast). Now that everything is streaming online, often at full HD quality, the backend bandwidth is VERY important. From Cisco's Press release:
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.
Having the ability to handle 3 billion simultaneous video calls or stream every movie could be a requirement amazingly soon.
if this truly delivers, it means that you can finally download at your given FiOS speeds of 2.4MB/s from servers that CAN upload that fast!
that's pretty revolutionary in my book!
@diamondsw Why yes, I do have Cisco (and Linksys) gear in my house.
@FrankJ No, the next big thing will be Google ISP's connections.
Based on the first 44 comments (when I first started counting), 6 negatively reacted to the product and 16 made positive comments confirming this was a revolutionary product (22 comments were unrelated to the product). So, the Ayes have it. Revolutionary.
@rock99rock *cough* iPad *cough*