Networking giant Cisco on Tuesday unveiled its highest-capacity router designed for carriers to drive high-bandwidth multimedia traffic to and from homes and businesses.

The move marks the San Jose, California, company's highest-profile hardware introduction in months. The company has focused much of its energies in the past 18 months on acquiring software companies and driving user applications into the network.

The device, called the Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series, is a so-called “edge” router, which means it is the carrier network router that service providers place closest to the customer.

“These are the workhorses of Internet traffic, and the ASR9000 is Cisco’s recognition of the stress that video and large files can place on the carrier network,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-ITResearch.

Edge routers move multimedia traffic between customer sites and the carrier network. They are frequently compared to core routers, which reside deeper in the carrier network.

Cisco is marketing the ASR 9000 as its first edge entry in the “zettabyte” era, a term the company coined for the growing IP traffic payload that will hit carrier networks in the next four years.

“We are forecasting that by 2012 global IP network traffic will surpass half of a zettabyte, which is more than 100 times the transcript of all the words ever spoken,” said Doug Webster, senior director in Cisco’s service provider marketing group.

The ASR 9000 provides up to 6.4 terabits per second of total capacity and will handle wireline and wireless data. The device will cost carriers at least $80,000, with availability planned for the first quarter of 2009.