Cisco's HFR is one for the books

If your to-do list includes downloading the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress in 4.6 seconds, then Cisco has a box for you, the vendor says.

Cisco’s CRS-1 router, announced in May, was certified by Guinness World Records as the fastest Internet router ever made, the vendor said this week. Cisco’s 92T bit/sec router is aimed at large telecom customers and Internet backbone carriers, although the company has said it doesn’t expect any purchase orders for the product for about a year.

In the meantime, Cisco has cooked up some ideas on how its top-line router - codenamed Huge Fast Router (HFR) during development - could be put to use (in theory):

* Allow the entire population of Massachusetts to make a VoIP call simultaneously.
* Let everyone in New York state download a 2.4M byte file at once.
* Set up a 6M bit/sec video stream for 15 million people.