12:10 PM -- The enviro-stuff is all fine and good, but the core router team at Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has reason to party, too. They're claiming 3,000 CRS-1s shipped, announced on the corporate blog last night after a false start early in the morning. (I ought give to them a hard time about that, but all I'll say is: Welcome to publishing.)

Cisco is claiming that 20 customers are using the CRS-1 in its multichassis form -- the size that's supposed to pack 46 Tbit/s worth of interfaces someday, if you use 72 boxes. (See Cisco Grabs a Guinness.) Cisco says it's shipped more than 175 chassis to those customers. Assuming every chassis is in use, that means an average size of nine chassis apiece. I'm guessing that's a couple of superusers (research-lab types) and a lot of minimal multichassis sales.

The product has proven viable so far, but a lot of questions stand between the present day and the 72-chassis future. Such as: Will carriers, five or 10 years from now, really want to funnel that much traffic into one point on the network? It's feasible but sounds awfully 1999.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading