In the few months that have been 2010, we have heard some big claims from a variety of companies. Google will be offering ISP services, IBM is replacing copper inside the machine with light. Apple wants to redefine mobile computer. Today we have yet another groundbreaking headline. And it comes from a usually media quiet company - Cisco.

They announced CRS-3 which is a new routing system that will take over for the CRS-1 predecessor. Aptly names, the CRS-3 is three times faster than the 2004 CRS-1 in use today and 12 times faster than Jupiter, its nearest competitor. Unlike the earlier referenced announcements, this will not impact the end user in any way when it comes to buying new equipment or updating any behaviors. This is a backbone issue and is currently being tested by AT&T. On a side note, the timing is perfect for AT&T, whose network was already buckling under the strain data hungry iPhone users only to be further taxed by iPad usage in just about 30 days.

What is three times faster? How does this relate? Here are some stats given to us by Cisco in terms of what can be done:

- the entire printed Library of Congress can be downloaded in just over a second.

- every man, woman and child in China (which, incidentally, is a third of the world’s population) can place a video call - simultaneously

- every motion picture every made can be streamed in less than four minutes.

Streaming video and downloading of large files has been eating into the bandwidth for a long time and John Chambers, CEO of Cisco says that it will continue to grow “200-500 percent per year.”

The CRS-3 will push up to 322 Terabits per second, but AT&T is currently, successfully, testing 100 Gigabits per second between New Orleans and Miami.

Cisco realized a need for much faster backbones and has more than conceptualized a solution. It is not only working in theory but in field testing as well. It has even been given a price tag to possible telecom customers starting at $90,000.

We have machines capable of processing so much data and the bottleneck is at the link. Simply put, we cannot feed information into our machines fast enough and they are often waiting while the processor runs millions of empty cycles. In corporate terms, that equals millions of dollars that could be made if the information was there to be processed. This is a major step toward remedying that problem.

With the ability to download the entire library of congress in less than one second, it is safe to say that information will always be at the ready.