posted 12-13-1999 03:42 PM         

"Potentially beating back the first real threat to its dominance in the Internet market, Cisco Systems today, Dec. 13, will unveil a new generation of its router that equals the performance and capacity of recently introduced equipment from several start-ups looking to topple the network giant.

Sources familiar with the company's plans said the Gigabit Switch Router 12016 is the bigger and faster successor to the GSR 12000, which controls about 87 percent of the Internet backbone market. The latest product, however, dwarfs its predecessor in capacity and scales to the same terabit-per-second range as equipment recently announced by Avici Systems and Nexabit Networks, which was purchased by Cisco's chief rival, Lucent Technologies.

Sharing the same operating system and components as the GSR 12000, Cisco's new router will provide the hundreds of service providers with investments in Cisco's gear with a natural migration path, according to Joe Skorupa, an analyst at the Ryan Hankin Kent research firm. "It provides investment protection for Cisco's current customers," he said.

In addition to raw capacity exceeding 5 terabits per seconds, the new router will feature interfaces capable of transporting information in 10-gigabit-per-second chunks. Next-generation service provider Qwest Communications International announced last week that it is using Cisco's equipment and interfaces, known in networking nomenclature as OC-192 (10-Gbps) ports, to construct a hyperfast link in its network from New York to San Francisco.