Nerds at Play

Cisco systems, one of the world’s biggest companies and makers of routers and switches, have just broken a world record.  They have made the world’s fastest router, the CRS-1.
 
The 92/tBit/sec CRS-1 router has been codenamed Huge Fast Router (HFR) by some nerds taking things a little too far.  Guinness came out and certified that, yes, it can shovel data faster then anything else currently on earth.  They did this without testing it of course; you, like them, just have to take Cisco’s experts’ word for it. No, nobody has actually bought one yet.
 
This news has been great by the normal round of unintentionally funny statistics. 
 
You could download the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress in 4.6 seconds (82 years over 56k dial up) 
 
The entire population of Massachusetts could make a VoIP call simultaneously. 
 
Everyone in New York state could download a 2.4M byte file at once. 
 
You could set up a 6M bit/sec video stream for 15 million people.
 
Feel free to insert any meaningless stat of your own here; remember your 8x1 conversions, and that these are not decimal Mbytes so that 24 is important.
 
This also has implications for the Internet2’s land speed record; kind of like the Tour-de-France for geeks. Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network currently hold the record at 4.23/gbits/sec transferring 840Gbytes across a distance of 16,346kms in less then 27 minutes.  This gives them the yellow jersey. 
 
The previous record (and no, I am not joking) was held by Caltech and CERN.  Caltech and CERN are more sprinters then runners, still holding on to the green jersey with a 68,431 terabit-meters per second transmission in February this year. Although they achieved an average speed of 6.25Gbps, this was only over a distance of 11,000 kilometers.
 
Both teams must be pissing their pants with Cicso’s announcement.  Making their new tech available to anyone with enough cash, it will be like steroids to any teleco that cares to adopt it.  Maybe Bell will become the US postal of Internet2’s land speed record?