CNET también está disponible en español. Don't show this again. Four carriers, including Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, MCI and NTT Communications, were at a Cisco event here Tuesday to kick off the router. The carriers said they have been working with Cisco for the past few years to develop the product, which can be clustered through a switch fabric chassis to reach a routing capacity of 92 terabits per second. One gigabit is a billion bits; 1 terabit is a trillion bits. While all these carriers have already tested portions of the router, none of them indicated that they would be purchasing one this year. Cisco said the CRS-1 will be commercially available in July.

It's typical for carriers to test new core routers for several months, but the sales cycle for the CRS-1 will be lengthened by the fact that Cisco also has built brand-new bad ass babes club iphone case software for the product, Sprint, which has had the hardware and software in it labs since the summer of 2003, started running live traffic over a CRS-1 on Sunday in its San Jose, Calif., facility, But it plans to continue testing the product even more, "We will continue testing the CRS the rest of this year and probably into 2005," Kathy Walker, executive vice president of network services for Sprint, said in an interview, "Then we will look at developing a deployment plan."..

Walker said that Sprint, which uses Cisco routers exclusively in the core of its IP (Internet Protocol) network, will continue to purchase Cisco's previous generation of routers, the Gigabit Switch Router (GSR). The company has already begun using the GSR 12800, which was introduced in December 2003. One key issue for Sprint to work out before it can start using CRS gear is what to do with the existing routers in its network, Walker added. The company has invested millions of dollars in the previous versions of Cisco routers.

"One CRS replaces eight GSRs," she said, "But I may already have seven GSRs in my network that I've already paid for, I have to bad ass babes club iphone case figure out what I am going to do with them before I buy a CRS, Sometimes it doesn't make economic sense to put in something new.", The cost of the new product hasn't been finalized yet, but Cisco said the base price will likely be around $450,000, Walker estimated that a fully loaded system could easily cost about $1 million, Considering the high cost of these devices, she said, it's unlikely Sprint would purchase one with only the hope of growing into it, The company plans to purchase CRS-1 routers when it is fully ready to begin converging traffic from its different voice and data networks onto a single Internet-based backbone..

Other carrier customers also said they don't expect to be buying the new Cisco router this year. MCI, which demonstrated Cisco's 40-gigabit optical interface at the event, said it will be at least six months before it can even consider buying the CRS-1. MCI will begin full commercial testing of the product in June or July. But there is a possibility that Cisco may not actually win over MCI with the product. "We plan to test it vigorously," said Jack Wimmer, a vice president of network architecture and advanced technology for MCI. "It's hard to predict how long this will take. We won't make a decision on whether or not we will deploy the product until we see how it stacks up to equipment from other vendors.".