The evolution of the market means Cisco's dominance could slip, because the trend of adding features such as voice, security, and IP services to routers means new vendors are moving into core router markets, says Jon Cordova, an access-networks analyst at market-research firm Infonetics Research. Cisco has about 85% of the router market, but its share could slip to 60% or 70% as the trend continues, Cordova says.

As a hint of future capabilities in store for company networks, the high-speed Abilene research network that serves the Internet2 community uses 12 Cisco 12000 series routers, and researchers are starting to install 11 Juniper T640 routers chosen for the network's next-generation core routing platform.

The T640s have 640 Gbps in combined input/output capacity and interfaces for traffic speeds ranging from 622 Mbps to 10 Gbps. In the Abilene network, they will aggregate connector and peer traffic and deliver backbone services, says Chris Heermann, a senior network engineer at Abilene who was instrumental in choosing the next-generation routing platform.

Abilene needed routers that could handle large individual data flows and provide advanced high-speed services such as IP version 6, plus IP version 4, Heermann says. Abilene's operators needed multicasting support, dedicated and real-time measurement capabilities at each point of presence, native IP version 6 support at 10-Gbps line rates, and advanced restoration services--an overall environment that was much more demanding than the commercial Internet, he says.

The project's founders hope to demonstrate how larger, more scalable networks can operate in a research setting, leading to broader use of stable, high-speed networks that support a variety of real-time services such as voice and video, as well as high-speed data applications.

"By pushing the envelope and looking beyond what is being done today," he says, "we hope to facilitate advances in technology that will be used in tomorrow's commercial Internet." Like his business colleagues, Heermann is counting on next-generation routers to deliver crucial parts of that equation.

Illustration by Richard Downs