The Cisco® ASR 9000 Series 4-port Line Card and 8-port 100 Gigabit Ethernet Line Card deliver industry-leading high density, with line-rate 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, to any slot of a Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Router. These high-capacity line cards are designed to remove bandwidth bottlenecks in the network that are caused by a large increase in video-on-demand (VoD), IPTV, point-to-point video, Internet video, and cloud services traffic. A single 100 Gigabit Ethernet port can now replace large 10 Gigabit Ethernet link aggregation bundles to simplify network operations. Based on Cisco CPAK™ technology, this line card has flexible interfaces that support 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet modes, so it gives customers the flexibility to mix and match interface types on the same line card.

For example, with the help of Cisco CPAK 10x10G-LR optics, a single 100 Gigabit Ethernet port can be divided into 10x10 Gigabit Ethernet ports using breakout cables or patch panels for unprecedented density and scale. These different interface modes can be configured easily through the command line interface (CLI) without resetting or restarting the line card. Using a “green design,” these line cards also let customers put an unused slice in power-saving mode to reduce power consumption. With these capabilities, the ASR 9000 Series line cards (Figure 1 and Figure 2) and routers provide the fundamental infrastructure for scalable Carrier Ethernet and IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) networks, promoting profitable business, residential, and mobile services