New Cisco Router Supports 322Tbps

Bandwidth at the speed of light? Maybe not but Cisco's new router will supports speeds up to 322 Tbps. What does this new phenomenon speed compare to? Cisco says that with this speed is enough to allow every person in China to make a video call at the same time. And with this new hardware it can be achieved.

The company's new large scale core router is call CRS-3, the CRS stands forCarrier Routing System. Cisco boasts that this new router is 12 times as fast as its nearest competitor and it is 3 times the speed of its predecestor. With this new found technology and hardware did not come cheap, the company stated that it spent $1.6 billion in the product's design and engineering.

Here is the break down of what 322 Tbps is, Tbps is terrabits per second and a terabit is a trillion bits. Now compare that to the mbps(megabits per second) that today's highest speed consumers and business broadband speed connections are measured in. Here are a few of the feats that 322 Tbps could do: Transmitting every motion picture ever made in5 minutes, downloading the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1 second, or transmiting the entire DNA sequence of 56,000 people also in 1 second.

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Testing is being prefomed now and CEO John Chambers estimated the router to be available before the end of this year. It also comes with a pretty expensive price tag, reporting that pricing will start at $90,000.

1Gbps Streaming?

The average internet user in the United States pays for broadband ranging from 1 - 12Mbps, allowing us to stream videos and download songs at a fairly decent rate. Even with these modern "fast" speeds, there are still situations in which faster speeds may be necessary. Siemens recently went to 500Mbps streaming with the use of white LED's, but there is a solution that works even better than that.

A Penn State graduate student and a professor have but a mechanism that sends data at a blazing 1Gbps. "Their setup sent data across a room by modulating a beam of infrared light that was focused on the ceiling and picking up the reflections using a specially modified photodetector. The pair says that their measurements show the system could support data rates "well beyond" the one gigabit per second they are currently claiming."

A wireless N connection is currently only capable of about 300Mbps and anyone who has done large data backups over this speed knows that it can still take quite some time, especially considering multiple users on the same router who may be using its resources. I personally look forward to this being available to the public. Take that, FIOS.