Cisco is announcing new capabilities of the Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System platform that are designed to expand its addressable market and reduce the cost for service providers to deliver packet-transport services.
Cisco further announced that one year after it was introduced, the CRS-3 is being adopted faster than the original CRS-1 platform, with 80 customers in more than 30 countries. Further,
The Cisco CRS-3 was designed to transform the broadband communications and entertainment industry by accelerating the delivery of compelling new experiences for consumers, new revenue opportunities for service providers, and new ways to collaborate in the workplace. Cisco's cumulative investment in the Cisco CRS family is $1.72 billion, further underscoring the company’s commitment to Internet networking leadership and enabling new services and applications for service providers while optimizing costs.
In less than one year, Cisco has shipped CRS-3 units to more than 80 global service providers in more than 30 countries. Since 2004, Cisco CRS units have been shipped to more than 450 service providers in more than 80 countries, on every continent in the world except Antarctica. To date, Cisco has shipped 7.5 petabits per second of core bandwidth capacity to these CRS platform customers, enough core bandwidth to support a basic video conference call with every person on earth simultaneously, says a representative.
The Cisco CRS-3 flexible packet-transport capability is a form of label switching enabled with the addition of a blade to the Cisco CRS platform. This capability scales the core network economically with fast switching, providing a high-speed, agile transport backbone that enables carriers to address this new market opportunity. The extension of the Cisco CRS-3 broadens the platform’s reach into new markets, while protecting service providers’ current investments in the core. It also complements the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 functionality and data center capabilities like Network Positioning System (NPS), cloud VPN, and classical Internet Protocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching routing.
Because the flexible packet-transport capability does not require a new standalone product to be deployed in a network, operators can add the capability to existing CRS-3 networks without expensive, time-consuming qualification testing.