8/25/2009 -- Cisco Systems Inc. this week unveiled an update that effectively doubles the density of its Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 Series, via the addition of a new single-slot 16 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) line card.

Cisco says its ASR upgrade lets it support delivering over 100 Gbps, more than any comparable module on the market today.

Market watchers call it a coup for Cisco, which -- with recent ASR customer wins at Cogent, Softbank, Verizon Wireless and Telstra -- continues to expand its market share in the Carrier Ethernet segment.

"Cisco now leads in Carrier Ethernet capacity, and it's clear that the [ASR 9000 Series] is gaining acceptance," said IDC analyst Eve Griliches in a prepared release.

Griliches, along with other market watchers, identifies a growing appetite for video and mobile services, particularly for technologies such as video-on-demand and Internet video, which she says fuels demand for scalable, high-capacity offerings like Cisco's ASR 9000.

Cisco, not surprisingly, pitches the revamped ASR 9000 as an Rx-par-excellence for a bandwidth-hungry age. At 400G-per-slot, the networking giant claims, the ASR 9000 can support up to 32 x 100 GE per system throughput for system. It's equipped with Cisco's QuantumFlow Processor, which -- in tandem with Cisco's IOS XR operating system -- boasts a number of self-healing and self-defending capabilities.

The ASR 9000 isn't just a hot-rodded edge router, either. It incorporates Cisco's Advanced Video Services Module (AVSM), which the networking giant says can deliver terabytes of streaming capacity at the aggregation edge, along with features like content caching, on-the-fly ad insertion, rapid channel changing capabilities and a built-in error correction facility. --Stephen Swoyer