5/27/2004 -- Just how high-end is Cisco’s new CRS-1? Well, for starters, it’s the priciest router Cisco or anyone else has ever marketed: Prospective customers – er, telcom carriers -- shouldn’t expect to bring home a CRS-1 for less than half-a-million dollars. On the basis of its price tag alone, then, the CRS-1 seems worthy of the appellation that Cisco executives invoked on several occasions during this week’s launch event: next-generation.

But as Cisco officials conceded during the event, CRS-1 may also be a technological triumph in search of a market.

Cisco President and CEO John Chambers, for example, called the CRS-1 “the next generation of routing, I’m not talking about an evolution of existing routing, I’m really talking about a new generation.” In case attendees misunderstood him the first time around, Chambers underscored this point by explaining “we went back to the basics and designed it from scratch.”

Under compulsion of what market forces has Cisco engineered the biggest and most expensive router ever produced? Call it the law of persistent under-estimation, at least with respect to technology consumption.

“Every time we talk about scalability, we’ve dramatically underestimated the loads that would go on the networks,” Chambers said.

Mike Volpi, senior vice-president and general manager of Cisco’s Routing Technology group, put it even more succinctly. “Most of us here don’t actually know what the applications [for the CRS-1] are going to be, and that’s the amazing thing about bandwidth and the Internet is that if we would have guessed four years ago, we would have been wrong,” he said. “The applications turn up, it’s sort of like, give people bandwidth and they will find freedom.”

Elsewhere, if Cisco customers are waiting with bated breath for Cisco to port IOS XR ported to their existing gear, they’d better take a deep breath. Or, better still, exhale – because it probably isn’t happening. “IOS XR is specifically targeted at the CRS-1, and … obviously there’s some key attributes and things that we’ll look at based on customer feedback, but to be very clear, IOS XR is absolutely targeted at CRS-1,” said Tony Bates, VP and GM, Carrier class multi-service solutions with Cisco, during the same event.

At the CRS-1 unveiling, Cisco touted testimonials from Deutsche Telekom, MCI, NTT Communications and Sprint, all of which have been provided feedback and other assistances during the CRS-1 development effort. During a Q&A that followed the press events, representatives from all four companies were asked about when they’d deploy one or more CRS-1s in their environments; most – with the exception of MCI, which is currently beta-testing the CRS-1 -- gave inconclusive responses, however.

“We are going to test the machine … [and] maybe it will take time to test, but if it is successful, we will eventually deploy this machine,” said Dr. Masayuki Nomura, senior vice-president and general manager of broadband IP services with NTT. Among the four customer representatives, Nomura seemed most impressed with the CRS-1’s aesthetics, noting “this is [a] very beautiful” machine.

The CRS-1 will start shipping in July, but don’t expect Cisco to simply rest on its laurels at that point. “You will see more innovation from Cisco over the next 12 months by a factor of twofold than what you’ve seen in prior years,” promised Chambers during the launch event. -Stephen Swoyer