Cisco Changes The Universe And Mankind Forever! → Cool...

Wonder whether Verizon and Comcast will buy these for core routers.

For everyone else it's completely overkill.

Okay, maybe Facebook could use one...

It's only applicable to wholesale carriers -- Level(3), TeliaSonera, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, etc. It has absolutely no relevance to any kind of end-user attachment nor would it have any impact on commercial or residential service delivery.

The CRS platform is about expanded multi-chassis density. Whereas standard router platforms have integrated stage 1 (Ingress) / stage 2 (backplane switching) / stage 3 (Egress) and you simply insert modules, the CRS architecture allows you to move the S2 process into a special fiber cabinet and scale your connectivity across multiple chassis all linked together via the fiber cabinet. Comcast is already doing this on the CRS-1 platform today at the core of their N*40G backbone.

The CRS-3 is simply an evolution in that architecture to allow greater density of 40/100G interfaces.

Understood.

That said, higher density = cheaper in the long run, so I'd expect that Comcast et al will benefit on the bottom line frm deploying these things. Also might allow for more speed upgrades on the last mile, particularly for FTTH providers like Verizon, since higher speeds on the last mile will translate into higher peak bandwidth on the core...

They only benefit if they needed higher density. Ie, a 747 doesn't do you a lot of good if all you needed was a Cessna. The maintenance will eventually kill you.That would only be true if capacity at the core was the limiting factor, and it's not.

You also have to keep in mind that the 322Terabit is an aggregate value. The per-slot capacity on each individual chassis is still 100Gbps, so you have to link 70-100 CRS chassis together (depending on the line card types) to reach that throughput number in aggregate. Nobody is doing that, not even Cisco.