7/21/2008 -- You don't hear all that much about the Carrier Routing System (CRS) 1 from Cisco Systems Inc. Call it a hype deficit, a scenario -- increasingly rare in today's hype-obsessed age -- in which the awareness or discussion of a technology isn't actually commensurate with its game-changing bona-fides.

At its debut four years ago, after all, CRS-1 was recognized as the fastest, brawniest and most ambitious routing system ever developed.

Four years on, that's still true. So you'd think you'd hear more about it.

The good news is that CRS-1 is quietly notching market share. Cisco has touted several high-profile customer wins in the last couple of years alone, for example.

And just this week, Cisco announced that another big-name carrier, Sprint, announced that it was deploying CRS-1 -- in this case, to bring 40 Gbps capabilities to its Global Tier 1 IP Network.

Cisco, Sprint (and hardware partner Ciena) achieved their 40 Gbps coup by tapping a technology called Internet Protocol-over-dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing (IPoDWDM); according to Sprint, customers are clamoring for beaucoup throughput to support triple-play and other next-gen services.

It's part of a phased adoption of CRS-1 on Sprint's part: When Cisco first introduced CRS-1 four years ago, it teamed with Sprint to conduct a 40 Gbps technology trial with live-production traffic. Two years later, Sprint started rolling CRS-1 out across its core IP network. The upshot, Sprint officials said, is that it's now deployed Cisco's routing behemoth at more than 25 U.S. locations.

Enter Cisco's and Sprint's latest 40 Gbps demonstration. Earlier this year, officials confirmed, Sprint finished testing a 40 Gbps IPoDWDM implementatin based on CRS-1 (with built-in transponders) and Ciena's CoreStream Agility platform (the latter technology is used to facilitate the transport of wavelengths across Sprint's fiber-optic network). At this point, according to Sprint officials, they've even deployed several 40 Gbps circuits that support commercial traffic.

"Deployment of 40 Gbps circuits throughout our IP core enables next-generation data, voice and video applications and allows Sprint to scale its IP network to address customer needs, as IP increasingly becomes the basis of communications services," said Sprint CIO and network officer Kathy Walker in a statement.

Cisco, for its part, is trumpeting Sprint's achievement as a vindication of its own 40 Gbps IPoDWDM strategy. Cisco was an early proponent of IPoDWDM, which boosts bandwidth up to 400 percent over existing 10- Gbps implementations, while at the same time using the same (legacy) backbone.

"Cisco pioneered IP-over-DWDM by introducing it to the industry in December 2005," said Kelly Ahuja, Cisco vice president and general manager, in a statement. "Sprint was an early adopter of both it and our IP NGN architecture to combine and distribute video, voice and data content rapidly to the benefit of its customers' network experiences and to do it efficiently to benefit its business." --Stephen Swoyer