The announcement Tuesday that Cisco swore would "forever change the Internet" was a great carrier router that's supposed to be able to download all the printed contents in the Library of Congress in a second, deliver every movie ever made in four minutes and handle video calls made by every man, woman and child in China simultaneously.

Cisco says it can move a cloud-enabling 322 terabytes a second, 12 times the Internet traffic of the nearest competitive product and clearly is the adrenaline boost to the network that Cisco promised to deal with the burgeoning growth of video transmissions, mobile devices and online services.

The widget, the CRS-3, a 3x upgrade of the existing six-year-old CRS-1 on which Cisco has lavished $1.6 billion developing, is meant for major Internet service providers and folks like AT&T, which was on hand to say it's been testing the thing between New Orleans and Miami and it looks wizard. AT&T won't need it for another year or two but it's happy it's there.

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who claims video is the next killer app, and is preparing for it, figures he's got no real competition, at least not this side of China.

The CRS-3 is supposed to be the "foundation of the next-generation Internet" and in the announcement's fine print there was also a fleeting reference to Cisco's UCS servers and Nexus switches being part of the overall strategic plan.

The CRS-3, based on a Cisco-developed Quantum Flow Array Processor made up of six chips, will start at $90,000 once it's finished the "world's first field trials of 100 gigabit backbone network technology." At those speeds it's projected to deliver a 1-gigabit-per-second connection to every home in San Francisco.

Juniper and Verizon are doing their own rival 100 gigabit trials, and Google, which is so keen on Top Gun speed, is planning to build out its own pilot high-speed broadband network.