back to article Cisco 'forever changes internet' with... a router

How will Cisco "forever change the internet"? With a new router. Which raises the question: What the hell is wrong with technology companies? When networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems sent word that today it would "make a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can you spell

    "Pump and Dump"?

  2. Eddy Ito
    Coat

    CRS-2

    IIRC, that's textish (textian, textese, whatever) for "can't remember shit too".

    1. Cameron Colley

      I'm not sure...

      ... but I think it's called "txt spk"?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not New News

    This CRS3 platform and announcement was it seems partially announced on cisco.com frontpage on 1st March.

    Video is inconvienant for most people. Why has 3G videocalling not taken off just about anywhere in the West? Scrappy coverage, maybe. You and your receiver both require a 3G-maintained mobile reception for the duration of the call. It should have been integrated by design in a better manner, so that 'best mode' was always used unless otherwise specified by the caller, so that, if available, video would be used, otherwise just audio.

    I know no single person who uses mobile cellular video calling, either in the UK, France or China, as I have many friends from those places. MSN or Skype is as far as people go, and even then many people prefer audio only as it's more private for each party concerned.

    Forgetting that, who wants to groom themselves thoroughly before making a videocall, when a phone call or audio will suffice? It will take at least a generation to change the habbit of preferring audio when video is sporadically used.

    1. Adam 10
      Thumb Up

      I use it!

      I must have used video calling at least 6 times in the last 4 years! :-P

      A typical video call goes like this:

      Person says "Hey, does that make video calls then?"

      I say "Yes. Would you like to see?"

      I then ring one of the 3 or 4 other people I know with a videophone, we wave sheepishly at each other for a minute, then say goodbye.

      Of course, with the ubiquity of videoconferencing at work I don't think it's a novelty anymore and haven't had to make such a call for a good couple of years.

      I get 90 inclusive video-call minutes a month and never use them...

      1. The Indomitable Gall

        Yes, exactly: teleconferencing.

        When there's two people in a call, lack of video is no problem. When there's half-a-dozen people in a call, not being able to see each other really gets in the way of conversation. Yet perversely, Skype only lets you video conference in one-to-one calls, because of bandwidth constraints.

        I'm studying with the OU, and the online tutorials really are badly hampered by the lack of visual cues (such as "confused face" and "general eagerness to say something"). I also do day work in a virtual team and there's similar problems, coupled with the risk of seeming aggressive when asking something due to lack of facial expressions.

        Video will be big once the pipes big enough to cope with multiple streams simultaneously.

  4. gautam

    Will prices tumble?

    Title says it all.

    Will the ISP's cost reduction be passed on to consumers? Or we are forever consigned to suffer Ripoff charges.

    Importantly, how will usage Caps be affected by this? Maybe we will exceed FUP in seconds now !

    Height of irony? You bet. Ask ofcom.

  5. gautam

    Will prices tumble? by one third?

    Title says it all.

    Will the ISP's cost reduction be passed on to consumers? Or we are forever consigned to suffer Ripoff charges.

    Importantly, how will usage Caps be affected by this? Maybe we will exceed FUP in seconds now !

    Height of irony? You bet. Ask ofcom.

    1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      I thought.....

      ... that the main cost to the ISP's is their contract with BT for the phone line link, rather than the cost of their internet pipes...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    CRS-2?

    http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/timeline/images/1986.jpg

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What's in a name?

    Has to be CRS-3 - it's three times as fast. Coming soon... CRS-9!

  8. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    WTF?

    Awesome

    Will that make my crusty old AT&T wires carry faster DSL? No, I think my Internet forever remains the same.

  9. John Savard

    At Least They Got This Right

    While the naysayers thought that they would only sell a dozen of their last really big router... they learned the lesson of those who thought that the IBM 704 was so powerful the world market could only absorb five of them!

    Videoconferencing for the masses? That's at least in the ballpark of the hype, even if it may seem a bit underwhelming.

  10. BlueGreen

    > Which raises the question: What the hell is wrong with technology companies?

    Or reporters that take snakeoil announcements and rebroadcast them.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Listening To People On The Telephone

    "Unless you like to do all kinds of other things when you are talking to people or listening to people on the telephone."

    Tried webcaming home to the wife & kids while working away years back & last year when on two different continents, totally failed conversation felt awkward & stilted, we went back to the traditional phone call method, where I could tune out what she had told me 20 times already that conversation, make miming yak yak yak motions with my hand & occassionally throwing in a "yes dear!" or "no dear!" to make it look like I was participating in the chat.

    Anonymous because there's always a chance she might see this. PH because shes been known to use a phone or two in her time.

  12. Captain Save-a-ho
    FAIL

    Yawn

    So, in six years, after the failed predictions of Voice and Video explosions, perhaps Cisco will predict that they're prepping the CRS-5 for the "explosion" of peer-to-peer networking that clearly will start another Internet revolution.

  13. Lunatik
    Coat

    Progress?

    92Tbps to 332Tbps in six years? Doesn't sound like much progress in the bizarre Moore's Law world of tech dick swinging, does it? Compare a 2.6GHz P4 with a Core i7-975...

    Unless what Cisco are pointing out is that the older CRS-1 was actually a blindingly advanced product that just happens to make their newest model look a bit of a damp squib.

    Oh wai...

  14. Ammaross Danan
    Headmaster

    Title

    Perhaps the CRS-X naming convention is similar to open-source projects, where odd numbers represent "unstable" builds, and even numbers are "production" releases. They just don't want to admint their CRS-1 and CRS-3 systems would have versionings of "0.1" and "0.3" in the open source world....

    Symantics aside, world-changing technology isn't what I'd label the CRS-3. 3x the bandwidth/performance is quite radical by any means, but the only "world-changing" impact they could muster from this would be if they gave it away for free (with an optional support contract of course. How else would they make money?).

  15. Hi Wreck
    WTF?

    Can they count

    Cisco used to count the bandwidth going into AND out of the router when they came up with their capacity figures (i.e, your 1MB stream counted as 2MB through their router). Are they still up to this trick, or can the CRS 3 actually pass the quoted number????

  16. Andy Tunnah
    Thumb Up

    automagically

    has now been firmly wedged into my vocabulary

    1. jake Silver badge

      @Andy

      Eh? Where have you been?

      I've been using "automagical" as a verb since the late 1960s or early '70s ...

      1. Apocalypse Later

        Automagic

        Fujica had a 35mm film camera called the "Automagic" in about 1958.

  17. Lance 3

    Fiber condition

    "AT&T still expects it to take a year or two to upgrade its backbone to 100 Gbps. Why this will take so long when Cisco will be shipping the CRS-3 in the third quarter is unclear. Ma Bell moves in mysterious ways."

    Just because a fiber strand can support 40Gbps doesn't mean it can support 100Gbps.

    1. Christian Berger

      @fiber condition

      Actually unless your fiber has no dispersion at the desired wavelengths (there are some fibers which are formulated to be like that) you can use wave length multiplexing. It's surely not cheap, but can be done. So the fiber itself usually isn't the main problem.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Tesco?

    Am I the only one that thinks Cisco's logo looks like the old Tesco logo?

    Conjures up images of shopping bags.

    And even the name rhymes.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Paris Hilton

      said that to a customer once

      in front of a cisco sales guy... "You could always get a tesco router to do that job"... ooops. We all had a good laugh but the cisco guy wasn't as happy!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow -- $320k NRE per system!!

    Holy smokes: they spent $1.6bn developing the CRS-x family, and have sold 5,000 systems, so by my math, each and every system carries with it a $320,000 NRE!!

    That goes on top of their COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), i.e., the cost to build one.

  20. Glen Turner 666

    Yeah, AT&T should install that stuff now -- because new routers alway work well, not

    "Despite the network bandwidth constraints, AT&T still expects it to take a year or two to upgrade its backbone to 100 Gbps. Why this will take so long when Cisco will be shipping the CRS-3 in the third quarter is unclear."

    Only a journalist would think that deploying a few hundred freshly launched routers into your network backbone with precious little acceptance testing sounds like a good idea.

  21. C 2
    Alert

    If you want a 1 Gbps link into your home,

    You'll be wanting to move to S Korea, the plan is to have that going by 2012.

    Presently 100Mbps to the home is common there.

    I'm hoping that if enough people know how shamefully far behind internet service is here in the US that the collective yelling and demanding will spur our fat lazy greedy telecoms companies to make good on the promises of upgrades that they've made in years past.

    Its sad but the options for 'broadband' in my area are 768Kbps, 1.5 Mbps, and 3.0 Mbps.

    1. cmaurand
      Linux

      Hey I don't even get that

      My current maximum connection is 2Mbps. Cable is not available, though I could probably get fiber for around $800.00 per month.

      1. Apocalypse Later

        Luxury

        Can't get broadband at all out here in the vast desolate wilderness of Gloucestershire. Not by landline anyway. Mobile gives dialup equivalent speeds, so we have to have satellite to get any speed at all. It is nominally 2Mbps, but suffers from latency and lag that rules out many services such as Skype. Decent speed for webpages, but not really broadband for more exotic uses.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Sure this guy isn't Max Chambers out of Monday Monday?

    Video is not a killer app. Where has this guy been for the last ten years?

    Google is not a wonderful company. Ditto.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      For crying out loud

      Of course video is the killer app. People need their streaming pr0n at the fastest speeds possible. What else is the internet for?

  23. Tom Samplonius
    Stop

    No cost savings

    There won't be any cost savings passed onto the users, as most of the cost is not in the core, but in the edge. Plus, I'm pretty sure that someone dropped a zero, and base CRS-3 is $900,000, not $90,000. And with appropriate line cards, it is going to cost a lot more. And probably still cost a lot more than racks of smaller routers.

    The CRS-1 only had 300 customers. Most installations cost well over $1M USD each. In fact, the CRS line was generally considered to be quite overpriced.

    Juniper is getting a lot of uptake in this segment, because their equipment is more modular. You can tie a number of Juniper chassis' together with a matrix chassis, making it one big router. This provides parts commonality between the high and mid range boxes. Plus, it does cost as much to develop. Juniper just needs to come out with a new matrix chassis ever few years, rather than dropping $1.6B USD on R&D. In fact, I think the CRS is a dead-end. It is one of those systems that big telcos buy, because it is the safe choice. No one is going to get fired for recommending a CRS.

    As far as the naming convention, Cisco is probably following the SONET OCx convetion. First, 1, then 3, and then times four, for each new model. So the next CRS will be probably be the CRS-12. And then CRS-48.

    Tom

    1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      Cost increases

      $90k could be reasonable for a basic chassis but as you say, by the time it's fitted out with 10,40 or 100Gbps cards the costs will be in the $1m+ bracket. But then being Cisco, some customer's won't actually pay that, especially if they're buying/selling a lot of edge and consumer devices.

      As for being overpriced, it may also have the same challeng the CRS-1 did packing a lot of power and heat into a small area. Which is again another reason why it can be cheaper to distribute rather than try and go for a BFR solution. And if you do less routing and more forwarding, you don't necessarily need humungus routing engines.

  24. G_C

    Hopefull...

    Well i'm happy to hear of improvements of this nature... no matter how disconnected I may be from seeing any benefit at all...

    Not a clue why they started bringing video calling into the article... that's a proper dead donkey... and yes 100 years ago people dreamed of such devices... but they also dreamed of hand held ray-guns... I wish I had a hand held ray-gun... and rocket boots.... video calls? I can honestly say I wouldn't answer one... I'd find the very idea of someone calling me in this way gauche, rude and intrusive... especially if I was up to no good at the time... ha!

    (anyhoo...)

    With such an announcement ... how long will it be before the 8Mb that BT promises me is consistantly over 1Mb?

    How long will it take to filter through to the masses and make a difference? Will the local BT Stowger be able to handle it!?

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "What the hell is wrong with technology companies?"

    Nothing. As someone else said, classic pump & dump.

    Also, if this is all so revolutionary, how come I regularly attend meetings over Skype? Hell, I even talk to my parents face-to-face over Skype.

  26. Neil Greatorex
    Pint

    @Andy Tunnah

    Automagically has been around for a very long time, a bit like me :-( It certainly predates bootp & DHCP. I can't be arsed to check, but I'm sure somebody will......

    Now if only someone would automagic away Cisco's "Setup Wizard".

  27. Filippo Silver badge

    video? no thanks

    I like the ability to lie about my location, state of health, of inebration, and of clothing, thanks.

  28. Adam Williamson 1
    FAIL

    Politicians and snake oil salesmen

    "That's nothing to be embarrassed about, or there's no reason to oversell it like a politician or a snake-oil salesman. (If there's a difference between the two)."

    Of course there is. With a snake-oil salesman, at least you get some snake oil. With a politician, all you get a distant and somewhat confused memory of having been promised some at some point...

    The problem with video calling is it's not actually useful for that much and is in fact rather actively inconvenient. I can call a friend while I'm walking down the street. I can't video call a friend while I'm walking down the street, and even if I could, what would be the point? I know what my friends look like and get to see them quite often. I don't need to see a somewhat jerky 3" picture of them when we're just having a chat...

    There's a niche market for people who like to look at each other and don't get to see each other for a long time, but that's about it, and that's already fairly well served. (I saw a kid in Safeway the other day walking around with a netbook, videoconferencing with what appeared to be some relatives in another province. That was quite neat. Only time I've ever seen something of the kind, though.)

  29. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    Nothing to do with fixing Mobile Networks.

    "which might just mean that all of these handheld devices with broadband links won't absolutely crash networks. "

    Mobile Networks are designed for symmetrical 5kbps to 20kbps voice traffic, assuming classic usage patterns of call usage and call duration.

    Due to spectrum limitations by the time there are 20 simultaneous data streams on a Mast sector you have dialup speed. With CDMA/EVDO and 3G/UMTS/FOMA/W-CDMA/HSPA the cell also shrinks and up to 1/2 capacity is lost due to "code noise".

    LTE only really offers x5 capacity if it's on a 20MHz channel instead of 5MHz.

    Unless cell operators quadruple or even higher the number of cells and find x20 more bandwidth, then Mobile can't offer large numbers of people broadband speed.

  30. Disco-Legend-Zeke

    So Finally...

    ...geographic routing.

  31. Schmeelster
    Jobs Horns

    Same old cr*p, different day..............

    Typical bullcr*p from the world leaders in its' production. How they make money purveying smoke and mirrors is an art form that we would all love to understand. Inferior products, lack of delivery, pure marketing gumph and a customer base that does not question them. Nice work Chambers! Any details on Power, environmentals, emissions, floor space etc.? Probably not. Line up and buy the next great thing in Data Center heaters.........................

  32. Tim #3

    Hmm.

    Video is the killer app," explained John Chambers, Cisco's chairman and chief executive officer. "It brings things to life."

    It sounds like he really doesn't understand some very basic facts. Either that or he's a vampire.

    BTW, 322Tbps is pretty impressive, however what speed does all the deep packet inspection gear run on & how much is that throttling our speed?

  33. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Video meetings mean I don't have to leave my desk.

    Too bad I never go to any.

    Up to now, video has been an optional extra AND not very good. If it's just available and works, I think people will work out how to use it. For voice calls we'll probably transmit a page like a semi-animated DVD menu and there'll be a snappy name for that... not so much containing our personal details as embedding ones that the other person already holds for us... how does welcome page sound?

    But maybe it'll be done through social networking and you'll have my friend-personalised public facing shop window to play with anyway.

  34. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Vapourware

    Is anybody else thinking Cisco are pulling a classic blunder of a naked short sell/ponzi spike for insiders?

    Certainly, this dude isn't impressed ....... http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2060-The-CISCO-Hype-Machine.html

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't they know

    Video phones are never going to take off until someone builds one into a watch.

    End of

  36. cmaurand

    Alcatel might have something to say about the claim

    Alcatel-Lucent makes some pretty compelling stuff. Cisco has had big problems trying to get the carriers to buy their routers. Alcatel-Lucent has moved routing into their carrier switches eliminating the need for separate equipment. An example would be the the 7450 ESS switches. I've worked on models not as capable as these and it was very nice stuff.

  37. Steve Barnett
    WTF?

    Ubiquitous 1Gbps - Don't make me laugh

    I leave 3 miles from a fibre exchange BT can only get me 468Kbps - which they claim is acceptable for a Business BroadBand connection...

    I'm going to move to Google City, Kansas :0)

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Video killed the radio .....

    reading through a lot of comments there a lot of folks who haven't used Video conf much at work, well i haven't worked at a place where its in the phone and used at all (like that horrible season in 24 where they used to call each other by video and you saw Chloe's face all stretched to the side... ) but at my last place we had a lot of video conf from our 2 offices in London.

    It was quite easy and the quality whilst not HD cinema quality was certainly more than sufficient and having a meeting convened in that way resulted in better communication as some large percentage (some El' reg troll can give me the number I’m sure ;) of our communication is body language.

    Anyway i for one welcome our new San-Fran bridge logo overloads!

  39. Idiots _Quotient
    Thumb Down

    Only Cisco Can Get Away With \ IT

    Cisco Tried 2 'forever changes internet' with... a *******rumore*******

  40. LawLessLessLaw
    Boffin

    [Citation needed]

    > People want to have video links instead of phone calls and service providers want to charge them for the service, so it is inevitable.

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