Wow, people are really going to town over that last post, so I figure I need to geek it up a bit again while I have the opportunity to do so.

At the beginning of this week, Cisco started the build up to an announcement on Tuesday. Cisco has been making some very bold claims that they were about to announce a product that would forever change the internet. A revolutionary new device that would blow our minds and leave us all gasping in awe.

Well, thats if you believe the build up and hype their marketing droids were throwing out there. But as is usually the case, the promise and hype were huge, but the unveiled product was a lot less than spectacular.

Meet Cisco’s new generation of the Carrier Routing System. The CRS-3.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The specs on this beast are pretty fricken impressive. I mean, put it all together and you can download the entire Library of Congress in less than 1 second. I don’t care who you are, thats pretty impressive. But ultimately, thats really all this new CRS delivers over the previous generation. Its faster than its predecessor.

I’m sorry, but how does a new generation of product that is faster than the previous version “forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments?” I mean, every generation of computer chip has done that for the past 30 years. Now we have multicore computers that are essentially allowing us to deal with twice as much data, faster than the previous generations of PCs. Not to mention speed and power improvements from reducing the sizes of the gates in a chip and the distances between gates.

Its called Moore’s Law and its been around since Gordon Moore wrote it in a paper back in 1965. And despite people saying otherwise, it still holds true today.

Normally I’d like to discuss the news thats all good and joyous and talk up the great aspects of the new technology. There really is a significant improvement in the new CRS-3 platform. But after the hyperbole that was thrown about in the build up to this announcement, I have to say I’m so completely underwhelmed that I’ll just let you view that video and figure it out for yourself. Believe me, 322 Terabits per second and the Library of Congress in 1 second is truly about the best you’ll get out of it all.

Whats truly annoying is that this isnt even technology most people will ever get to experience or use themselves. This is aimed squarely at the major telco markets. Someone like AT&T who apparently are dealing with around 19 Petabytes of data across their network every day. Put simply, unless you’re that big, this is more than a waste of your resources.