In a press release this morning trumpeting the sales success of its CRS-3 carrier routers, Cisco made mention that both AT&T and Comcast were using the routers for their respective 100 Gigabit services.
Cisco, which competes in the router space with Juniper Networks, introduced the CRS-3 router last year. Since then, it has shipped CRS-3 units to more than 80 global service providers in more than 30 countries. The carrier routers, which have a processing speed of up to 322 Terabits per second, come with a starting price tag of $90,000 and can range up into the millions of dollars.
To date, Cisco said its cumulative investment in the Cisco CRS router line was $1.72 billion, which includes its CSR-1 router.
Verizon has deployed 100 Gigabit Ethernet both here and abroad. As for the deployments by Comcast and AT&T, the Cisco press release didn’t provide a lot of details.
“Since introduced, we have been very impressed with the CRS platform,” said Comcast’s Kevin McElearney, senior vice president of network engineering. “Comcast’s backbone and metro networks are 100G production-ready today with live 100G optics carrying customer traffic. The CRS-3 brings true 100G into the IP packet layer this year for Comcast allowing more network efficiencies for our next-generation converged services.”
Last year, AT&T took the CRS-3 for a test drive in a field trial of a 100 Gigabit backbone network technology, which took place in AT&T’s live network between New Orleans and Miami.
“We are very pleased to have worked with Cisco on a successful standards-based 100 Gigabit deployment in a live production network,” said AT&T CTO John Donovan. “We are entering the next stage of global communication and entertainment services and applications, which requires a new set of advanced Internet networking technologies, and Cisco’s groundbreaking CRS-3 platform is advancing those technologies.”