Cisco: The company that cried "Wolf!"

A couple of weeks ago I, along with many other hacks, got a personalised press release from Cisco. it said, "Martyn, ready yourself for Cisco to make an announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments."

"Aha", I thought. "This must be significant. Perhaps we are at last to have Cisco's much-vaunted "Consumer Strategy" explained to us. Perhaps there's some secret bit of new kit about to be revealed (like a rumoured set-top box) that really will 'forever change the Internet'".

But no, we had been fed snake oil. Tuning-in to Cisco's webcast yesterday afternoon we (eventually) learned that the company is as adept and shameless as any other in over-egging the pudding.

For what Cisco has actually done is continue to do what it is famous for and what it does best - introduce an incrementally improved router. Laudable no doubt but not quite what we had been led to expect. This was oversell writ so large you could read it from the moon.

Cisco has spent US$1.6 billion on router R&D and it has been money well spent with the Carrier Routing System (CRS) line becoming a huge success since it was introduced six years ago. The CRS-1 both confounded analyst's expectations and vindicated CEO John Chamber's faith in the product. At the time of its launch critics claimed there was a market "for a maximum of 12 such high-end routers" around the world. Since then these people have had to eat their words and Cisco has installed more than 5000 CRS-1 systems globally.

The CRS-3, that was launched to such over-the-top brouhaha yesterday is the logical next-generation successor to the CRS-1 - but that's all it is. OK it offers telcos and ISPs 12 times the traffic capacity and a threefold increase in bandwidth - all well and good - and can provide an enormous 322 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth which will be of great value as video-based application proliferate. No doubt it's a good piece of kit but with an entry price of US$90,000 you'd expect it to be.