5:20 PM -- I haven't had a chance to talk to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. about the NetEngine V6 400G router announced at CommunicAsia this week, but they've certainly made it out to be a doozy. (See Huawei Unveils Service Router.)

The biggest news is up-front in the press release: Huawei is claiming 400-Gbit/s slots. (Given the industry's penchant for doubling capacities, that probably means capacity for 200 Gigabit Ethernet flows.) If it's truly available, then it's a step ahead of others. Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) is promising 400 Gbit/s per slot for the ASR 9000, but not until later. Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) says it can do 100-Gbit/s slots on the T1600. (See Chipping Away at Cisco's ASR 9000 and Juniper Claims 100-Gig First.)

Huawei's press release mentions capacity for just 960 Gigabit Ethernet flows, though, so there's some statistical multiplexing going on if you max out every slot. (Come to think of it, I don't see a mention of how many slots it has.)

The press release goes on to list a lot of the features that have been glommed into routers: a session border controller (SBC), a broadband remote access server (B-RAS), deep packet inspection. It can apparently serve as a gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) as well.

There's even video monitoring, something that's becoming a hot router item. (See Cisco Routers Start Watching Video.)

All told, it sounds like an interesting entry. Now, I didn't quite make it out to Singapore for CommunicAsia. (I did walk about halfway down the block at one point today. Do I get a travel voucher for that?) If anyone's gotten a gander at the NetEngine V6 400G in person and would like to share, please fill us in on the message boards below.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading