The internet changing news from Cisco (CSCO) the tech world has been anxiously awaiting was unveiled today. Cisco’s CRS-3 router has been heralded by CEO John Chambers as a system that can download the Library of Congress in a second, stream every movie made in four minutes and allow simultaneous video calls by every single person in China. It will be available at a cost of $90K in the 3rd quarter of this year. Mighty impressive, but let’s see what the tech experts have to say. I thought I’d do a run down of some of the reactions to the big announcement today.
BNET doesn’t see any immediate gratification unless others get on board and says, “Chambers’ promise depends on cable operators and their telecom rivals abandoning greedy habits like doling out bandwidth in metered increments and randomly hiking service rates. So, this could take a while.”
From ChannelWeb
ChannelWeb reports that Cisco’s statement of 12x the capacity is aimed at competitor Juniper which has issued a statement saying the claims are misleading: “The claim of 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system is based on a theoretical maximum of 72 interconnected CRS-3 chassis in order to achieve the 322Tbps total capacity — this will likely never be deployed in practice due to space, power, and manageability realities.”
From Yankee Group
The Yankee Group notes that the CRS-3 is IPv6 ready, designed to handle the explosion of mobile devices, “cloud ready” and 10x the speed of the closest competitive product but doesn’t quite live up to the big hype.
Quote: “So, did the Cisco CRS-3 live up to the immense hype that preceded it? No, I don’t think so. But they did set a very high bar. It’s a good solid announcement that will allow network operators to put a foundation in place to drive differentiated multimedia and mobile services.”
In my opinion, the technology is great and a big step towards handling the explosion of data, but let’s put it in perspective. As a UBS analyst pointed out today, the high end router market represents less than 5% of Cisco revenues. The new router may be a game changer for the internet in the years to come, but it’s probably not a game changer for the stock price.
Shares of Cisco were flat today. Get your CSCO trend analysis here.