As reported on Friday I was reporting a huge announcement from Cisco that was dubbed “The Internet will change forever” hype. If you want to track the live blogging of the announcement go here from Scott Raynovich. It was the general opinion of all journalists that this made Cisco look bad for overhyping this announcement.  TelecomTV was very critical of this overhype.

I reported five major elements that Cisco was going to announce an end-to-end network play which would either will be announced individually or collectively as one big “grand” vision.

Here is what I heard and posted last Friday

Here is what appears to be breaking next week:

1) An “AppleTV” style cable set top or edge consumer box based on their Scientific Atlanta technology

2) Partnerships with service providers for ultra high speed access to the home

3) 100 Gigabit Ethernet on their Routers (upgrade to CRS-1)

4) Content and content delivery offering including lower end telepresence integration with possible content deals

5) A new vision that integrates the pieces above as owning the vision of the Internet touted as a “grand vision.”

It’s mainly a consumer play for Cisco, but it seems to touch on other markets: 1) consumer, 2) access, 3) edge, 4) core network, and 4) content provider and possibly low end telepresence.

Cisco will be touting the combination or all of the above to be a “complete overhaul” of the existing Internet in a broad “end to end” announcement that would “forever change” its shape and purpose.

Three Out Of Five – Not Bad

Three out of my five predictions were correct. Two big missing pieces from my report: No killer AppleTV style set top box and no content delivery offering with telepresence. Not sure if they got pulled from the announcement given how underwhelming the actual presentation was from the hype.

I guess my idea of changing the Internet forever was different than what was announced by Cisco.

Here is the summary of the announcement

– CRS-1 Product Announcement
– Service Provider endorsement with AT&T
– Grand vision and architecture play for end-to-end Cisco solution

Cisco did not announce a set top box or content distribution solution with telepresence. However, John Chambers did push on multiple occasions the notion that video is the killer app and highlighted rich media examples through his pitch.

For example, Chambers briefly hand waved over some key areas that we were hearing: media streams, 3dTV/HD, smartphones, tablets, telepresence, and gaming.

Reactions from around the web

Engadget thought it was not worthy of the hype and that was the general consensus on Twitter.

Engadget writes:

Cisco promised us a significant announcement this morning, one that would “forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments,” ….

We were instantly bowled over with the shocking news that video is the killer app of the future internet, before getting it drilled into our heads that we really need, like and want more bandwidth. No kidding — so what, Cisco, what is your revolutionary next step? Is it the space-based IP router? Some killer alternative 4G connectivity?

Well, it turns out it was the CRS3. The what? Cisco is bringing out a new Carrier Routing System, which Pantaj Patel describes as “this is huge” in a perfect monotone. We couldn’t agree more….

the sum of the whole thing is that Cisco is just refreshing its backhaul hardware and regurgitating promises about 100Gbps bandwidth and whatnot.

The internet remains safe and un-revolutionized for another day.

The New York Times felt the same way and Ashlee Vance points out an angle that highlights that Cisco was marketing directly to Joe stockholder and big carriers. So true Ashlee hence the overhype.

NYTimes highlights this point in writing:

On Tuesday morning, as most of us in Silicon Valley ate breakfast, the Internet changed. The shift happened so quickly that it felt both jarring and stupendous at the same time.

O.K., the Internet didn’t really change in any discernible way. Rather, Cisco released a new router – sorry, make that a new routing system – called the CRS-3 that the company has spent weeks hyping as the gateway to a new era of Internet wonders, that it “will forever change the Internet.”

(Even my dad, who has zero interest in networking, heard about this event and wanted to know what Cisco had in store.)

The general tech blogs were enamored by the examples that showed the speed that Cisco was touting.

Comments from the hardcore experts in the networking community was that the announcement underwhelmed them.

Here is some quotes from some of those networking experts:

so how do they calculate 322TeraBytes / second ? Whats the ports x
cards x chassis maths.. ?

It’s just the same old CRS-1 with new linecards and fabric chassis. I
am eagerly waiting to find out if there is a product code for a
sticker with the number “3” to affix over the “1” on the existing
chassis.

Whats sad is Cisco continues their marketing spew of X number of Tbps,
assuming you could actually multi-chassis that many systems. I love
some of the marketing in it though: “Over a year, it can save over 300
acres of rainforest”.

I want to know what happened to the CRS-2.

“We are going to revolutionize the Internet.  <wait a few days>  “We have this new router we have that is pretty much a minor evolutionary step from our old router, that is not even as kewl & awesome as our competitors are -already-shipping-.”  I’m not even going to mention the startups pushing 4-5 times as many Gbps per slot in per-release versions -today-.  Yeah, some revolution.  Not.

Whatever math they use, remember it´s cisco math, so whatever number you end up with, double it :)

I´m not really a cisco basher, I thnk they do good stuff and deserve a lot of respect for a lot of great work. This particular release has lots of fishy marketing smell.

On a slightly related topic, I was told by someone that Cisco was becoming an ASP and providing a service for virtual machines.  I was told this third or fourth hand and it was all hush hush secret.

Finally a great angle by Scott Raynovich at the Rayno Report. He nails it. Worth reading.

Scott writes

There was an incredible amount of hype leading up to Cisco’s announcement of a new core router, the CRS-3. Typically, router announcements are not covered in detail by the mainstream press, but with Cisco’s marketing acumen, they were able to raise the level of interest to a crescendo.

Big deal? sure. Was it the revolutionary thing that will change the Internet? No. A revolutionary innovation would be if somebody suddenly announced an entirely new technology, like optical routing. Or that routers weren’t even necessary anymore. A true innovation is unfathomable, such as trying to imagine the World Wide Web in 1982.

This is an incremental upgrade of the traditional routing technology. It is, in fact, a crucial and necessary upgrade in capacity to an existing product that helps Cisco keep their edge in the core router market, but not an entirely new technology.

Here are the pertinent facts of the announcement:

* The CRS-3 will triple the capacity of its predecessor, CRS-1. Cisco says the new router will have a capacity of 322Tbps (terabits per second)

* Cisco said it spent $1.6 billion developing the router

* The product is in field trials and will ship toward the third quarter of this year. The price will start at $90,000

* So far, AT&T is the only service provider that has announced that it is testing the product in field trials.

Cisco Highlights Presented

Here are some good posts and some highlights from the presentation:

CRS-3 Performance

– 12x performance over the competitors
– Over a billion videos at one time
– The required architecture in how to move forward in the future Internet
– Video is the killer app
– Scale: 322 Tbps – 3x the scale of CRS-1
– Service Attribrutes: 2x intelligence (core ipv6 + data center cloud)
– Savings: 1x CRS Family protection investments

Router Speeds – 322 Tbps – In Theory What That Might Do

– Enables everyone in China to make a video call simultaneously
– Delivers all the movies every made in just four (4) minutes
– Can deliver 1Gb to nearly every household in San Francisco
– Download entire printed collection of the library of congress in one (1) second

I have been very critical of Cisco mainly because I just don’t see their vision playing out in the way that they think it will. I do agree with their vision of the Internet in terms of more speed, video, collaboration, services, etc.

As I said in my previous post, we all want high-speed networks that do bazillion/Gbps, low cost cloud computing and storage, tons of on demand rich media, video telepresence, and smaller faster cheaper mobile devices. I just don’t see it happening from one vendor.

I hope that Cisco will have more than what appears to be a “me too” set of individual announcements bundled as a message saying “Cisco is the future and cross the bridge with us to that future”.

More of my angle on this is coming in a followup post. Meanwhile here is Cisco’s core router and grand vision announcement.

With more than 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system, the Cisco CRS-3 is designed to transform the broadband communication and entertainment industry by accelerating the delivery of compelling new experiences for consumers, new revenue opportunities for service providers, and new ways to collaborate in the workplace.

Overview:

* The Cisco CRS-3 triples the capacity of its predecessor, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, with up to 322 Terabits per second, which enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.

* The Cisco CRS-3 enables unified service delivery of Internet and cloud services with service intelligence spanning service provider Internet Protocol Next-Generation Networks (IP NGNs) and data center. The Cisco CRS-3 also provides unprecedented savings with investment protection for the nearly 5,000 Cisco CRS-1 deployed worldwide. Cisco’s cumulative investment in the Cisco CRS family is $1.6 billion, further underscoring the company’s commitment.

* AT&T, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, recently tested the Cisco CRS-3 in a successful completion of the world’s first field trial of 100-Gigabit backbone network technology, which took place in AT&T’s live network between New Orleans and Miami. The trial advances AT&T’s development of the next generation of backbone network technology that will support the network requirements for the growing number of advanced services offered by AT&T to consumer and business customers, both fixed and mobile.

* The Cisco CRS-3 is currently in field trials, and its pricing starts at $90,000 U.S.